Alyssa & Ryan's Tri-Valley Wedding in Dublin, CA

From behind the decks, I had the best seat at Alyssa and Ryan's wedding. We ran the night from a booth set right at the edge of a white frame tent in Dublin, looking straight down the length of the tables — so every toast, every reaction, every first step onto the floor happened in front of us as the dusk light faded behind the canopy. It was an open-air, tented celebration, the kind where the party and the outdoors blend together.

Inside the tent the tables were dressed in crisp white with pale branch centerpieces, almost wintry against the warm evening sky beyond the fence line. Alyssa had come down the aisle to an acoustic "Die With a Smile," and Ryan was emotional before she'd taken three steps. As the natural light dropped, our setup took over — tube speakers up on stands, a stack of laptops glowing on the table, a low light wash starting to color the tent.

From that vantage point we watched Alyssa and Ryan take the floor for their first dance to "Lover" by Taylor Swift, twirling under the lights like the room wasn't watching, the crowd turned toward them in their folding chairs with phones up. The mother-son dance to "Forever Young" had Ryan's mom in happy tears — the kind of quiet moment that lands even harder when everyone's seated this close together.

Then we built it out. The floor opened to "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" and packed immediately, and from there it just climbed — a throwback run with "Yeah!" and "Hey Ya!", a current-hits block for Alyssa's friends, and a peak-of-the-night "Sweet Caroline" with the whole tent belting it out. There's something I love about a backyard-style tent wedding: it's unpretentious, everybody's close, and the energy has nowhere to go but straight back at the couple.

We closed under the lights with "Closing Time" and sent them off through sparklers into the cool Tri-Valley evening. Alyssa and Ryan, thank you for an easygoing, open-air Dublin night and the best view in the house.