Marble Rye Photography

We love Melissa so much! She was our wedding photographer less than a month ago and took our engagement photos before that. She seriously is the best. I am a photographer as well and was ultra picky during our search, but once we saw Melissa’s portfolio online, we knew she was the one. We were immediately drawn to her style. Prior to our wedding, we had an awesome engagement session with her around our favorite spots in San Francisco. She was super warm and made us feel so at ease. She was super communicative leading up to our wedding, too - making sure we had all our priority shots down. Her beautiful, quiet energy was also such a blessing on our wedding day! I was a pretty nervous bride but she is such a calming force and so easy to be around. We took some of the standard family and portrait shots because we wanted those, but she also captured really neat scenes in between - she’s a master at finding and capturing those fleeting moments that might get lost in the blur of the day. We cried just looking at our sneak peeks, so we know the full gallery is going to be awesome. Melissa is the greatest! We can’t wait to work with her again and we highly recommend her for anyone looking for a magical wedding or life photographer.

We could not have asked for a better wedding photographer! Melissa was an absolute pleasure to work with and we exuberantly recommend Marble Rye Photography to any and all! In planning, she was attentive and enthusiastic, eased our worries, and kept us on timeline. From our engagement shoot through the last dancing photos of our wedding night, Melissa moved non-stop to capture every look, angle, and interaction, and it truly shows in the results. Her journalistic approach to photography captured the genuine energy and joy of the day without invasive prompting and posing. Looking at our photos, we are constantly wowed by the vibrancy of her work and the fully saturated aesthetic of her photography that makes every photo pop. We loved everything about Melissa and Marble Rye enough and are already thinking of ways to work together again!

We hired Melissa for our May 2019 wedding in Ojai. We just got our full gallery of photos and my parents called me to say that hiring her as a photographer was the smartest wedding decision we made. My husband and I both agree and were in (happy) tears looking through all of the images. We were referred to Marble Rye though our wedding planner and were immediately attracted to the documentary style photos. Although the rate was higher than our initial photography budget allowed, our planner suggested we spend the extra money in this category and cut back elsewhere- she was right! Melissa does a fantastic job of capturing the feel of the event itself, not just posed photos. This was something that was really important to us since we didn’t hire a videographer and she delivered beyond what we expected. From the moment we met over coffee a few months before the wedding, we both felt like we could trust her and she understood what we were looking for. Aside from taking wonderful photos, Melissa is extremely thoughtful and a joy to be around. She handled our families with ease and was a calming presence in the morning when I was getting ready. We wholeheartedly recommend Melissa as a wedding photographer and are grateful for the memories she captured.

Melissa is incredible. It has to be a dizzyingly challenging job to stand out from a sea of folks offering very similar services using very similar equipment, to come off as both extremely professional and also very likely to be a close friend if you happened to meet under different circumstances, and to radiate confidence and calm while still being nimble and responsive in order to adapt to any unexpected changes (in lighting or emotions!) on what is often a very stressful day for the folks who have retained your services. Melissa excels on all fronts. And I haven't even mentioned her actual photography, which is evocative, sensitive, and does a better job of capturing human emotion than any other wedding photographer that my wife and I researched. Some folks want a photographer who will get them the photos they want to see afterward. Others want someone who will document their wedding as it was, to help them relive the memory and to see it from even more perspectives. Many photographers will satisfy the first priority and produce excellent staged photos, but from my experience as a wedding attendee, not many can fulfill both criteria without being painfully obvious or in the way of the wedding itself. Melissa especially impressed us with the strength of her wonderful candid photos and her eye for capturing the entire event, not just the parts surrounding the wedding couple (though of course those images were exquisite as well). And she was able to do this all without a second shooter, without changing any part of the flow of the event, and with me hardly noticing that she was there most of the time. Melissa has now relocated to Northern California, but if she's willing to travel to your area then I wouldn't look any further for the perfect wedding photographer.