Safeena Noah Photography, Malibu, CA (2026)

03/03/2023

Texan desert x Kenya’s Maasai Mara x desert boho is the style symphony I didn’t know I needed.

FOR THE PHOTOGRAPHERS–– DETAIL SHOTS

I’ve not once in my Instagram life made a post just for wedding day details; to be brutally honest I used to write detail/decor photos off as mostly void of meaning and thus less worthy of sharing. I’m sure I’m not the only one. But now I see them as another beautiful reflection of the couple, their story, and the values they hold near and dear. These choices were made with thought and care, and I hope to honor that.

So here we are…a collection of details from Micah + Karri’s Maasai-Mara-Inspired wedding under the stormy desert skies of Terlingua, Texas . WHEW.

The Maasai inspiration was a sweet homage to Micah’s background as a Kenyan born-and-raised safari guide on the Mara (s/o ). It married (pun!!!) perfectly with Karri’s boho-chic Texan vibes.

The wind was on something else this day, so everything was held down with rocks and pebbles. The dance floor was made of a collection of rugs thrown down on desert dirt. One of my favorite images from the entire day is in slide 5-6; it shows the Maasai spears that Micah’s family brought over from Kenya laying against the reflection of the Texan sky, complete with a stray Topo Chico to the side. Entirely accidental, but the absolute essence of what the day felt like.

Which brings me to the other major thing I’m learning about these once-intimidating detail/decor shots–– they need not be contrived facades of perfection. They can still be as honest and meaningful as the emotional candids I’m posting the other 99% of the time. Styling mats and buckets of extra florals are great but so are elements of the natural landscape, the texture of the floors, and the beautiful imperfection of tablecloths that are practically blowing away in the wind.

If you struggle with detail/decor shots, I encourage you to look for the meaning and thought behind your couple’s choices. Honor what’s actually happening that day–– even if it’s not perfectly styled. These objects are inanimate, but they tell living, breathing stories.

03/01/2023

updated life philosophy:
trails are just runways for outdoorsy people

04/13/2022

There’s this lie that we photographers are taught to believe about how couple’s portraits are the single most valuable thing to photograph on a wedding day. About how they’re what our couple’s are hiring us for, and how those are the only “Insta-worthy” parts of the day.

The portraits from Micah and Karri’s Texan-desert-meets-Maasai-Mara wedding are some of my favorites. But when I was putting together the Instagram collage, I couldn’t figure out how to make room for them amongst the really-happening candids.

These are the ones that tell the story of the day and who Micah and Karri are, more than anything I can direct or contrive. Safari guide boy hailing from Kenya meets Texan NICU nurse babe, and they build a beautiful, lively, cultures-colliding life together. They open up new worlds to each other; they look at each other in a new way that they never have and never will look at another person. They love their people fiercely, and they can *get down* in 40 mph winds.

I’ll share the portraits another day (they’re bangers, if I do say so myself), but I wanted to dedicate this little square on the grid to shedding the lie. This is the good good stuff. Whether you’re planning your day or documenting them for a living, don’t you forget it🌞

09/04/2021

We don’t half-ass things around here so GRAB THE POPCORN because we make films now. All thanks to my exceedingly patient and annoyingly talented partner in love and business . This is our first season doing photo and video together and he has tolerated a world of nit-pickiness that only my college capstone group project members are familiar with. We’re one of *those* couples now 😬

Anyway, enjoy some favorite moments from one of our favorite days this summer with our favorite New Mexicans 😊

09/01/2021

First look with the newly minted Mr. and Mr. Tompkins-Cobb, y’all.

Ty texted me before the wedding just to say, “I’m going to cry all day.”

I cried, they cried, everyone cried. The sky even cried for a few moments during the ceremony before the clouds cracked open for an evening of sunshine. As if God wanted to share a little pre-dance-floor happy cry with the rest of us.

These two have been through fire and stone to get to this day, and for their love to remain as gentle and tender as it is is nothing short of a miracle. This is the stuff that assures me of the existence of the divine.

Thank you, Giff and Ty, for honoring your love for one another and throwing an iconic party to celebrate it.

tl;dr - Everyone’s biggest Pepperdine crushes married each other and it was a more beautiful, holy experience than free Lily’s before Convo.

06/02/2021

Starting my belated catch-up from the last couple weeks with these two— Micah and Karri, getting engaged in Yosemite just before a snowstorm rolled in.

Let me start by saying proposals scare the daylights out of me. I only really shoot them as a gift for friends at this point. And also, this spot in Yosemite scares the daylights out of me. I take new Yosemite visitors here all the time because it’s incredibly beautiful, but there are so many sheer drops that any lack of awareness (or a particularly strong gust of wind) can go fatal. There are also typically a lot of photographers and couples, and people scare me 🙃

ALL THAT BEING SAID, I would document this moment again and again because the joy, friendship, and love here was palpable. I met Micah half a decade ago when I was living near Nairobi. He was knee-deep in safari guide training because that’s just the kind of rad human he is. I moved back to the States, and through some hilariously random God-given circumstances, met and became close with his cousin Ash, who works in Yosemite.

So when it came time to plan a proposal a few months ago, Ash, Micah, and I (and a dozen other MVPs) schemed. Micah’s only requests were somewhere beautiful, and to use a Maasai blanket so he could have a piece of home with him.

And the payoff couldn’t have been sweeter. I gained a new friend who feels a lot like an old friend (looking at you ), climbed some granite, and got to eat pizza while the sun set over Yosemite Valley. Truly, what more could a girl ask for?

So cheers to the future Conways, impending Kenyan safari hangs, enneagram 4 bonding, and people who make me absolutely stoked to do things I’m scared of. Love you guys.

P.S. special shoutout to 1- for the last two photos. Swipe to #10 for bonus content of me being a cold, cold pizza gremlin. And 2– for helping me recover from my celebratory poor decision-making so I could get on the road to Arizona the next morning. Truly the loml. @ Yosemite National Park

05/14/2021

A little carousel of a few favorite desert moments with Giff & Ty this weekend! Let me know your fave. These two are truly magic together so I couldn’t choose just one.

I admire Giff & Ty a lot, and I typed up a whole spiel on all the ways I do. But all the richest, deepest words simply don’t do justice to who they are or what they have together.

Thankful to know these two; thankful for unlikely paths that overlap and weave all of our lives together; thankful to be reminded that love this true and magnetic exists and thrives, even in the harshest environments🌞 @ Joshua Tree National Park

04/29/2021

yes, you are your sister’s keeper

Just settling back in from a big 1.5 weeks in the little world of Saf. I dipped my toes in editorial work with , created just for fun for the first time in a long time, drove for 30+ hours, climbed in stormy Moab, got 2 incredible nights of sleep in my Subie, photographed a wedding in Palm Springs, and got fully vaccinated. It honestly feels a bit trite to talk a ton about that little world of Saf right now. I’d trade all of those gifts in my little world for a little more justice and accountability in our big shared world. For more collective sighs of relief. I think we’re walking in that direction, with hopeful trepidation. But hope nonetheless. And the hope for this little world of Saf is that I can learn to better steward justice in my art and work. The page is turning and I’m ready for the next chapter 🌓

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04/06/2021

Tafadzwa + Tiauna’s elopement in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. They let me plan everything from head to toe, from picking where they eloped to what in the world we would do all day. Their only request was snowy mountains….and Colorado delivered. We were bestowed with a fresh coat, beautiful sunshine, and roads cleared just in time :)

They came with just their parents, and together we got a little lost on mountain passes, snowshoed in 3+ feet deep snow, continuously fell into said snow, ~attempted~~ to sled (do not recommend in deep snow unless you want to fail and laugh a lot, so actually I do recommend), drank some jet-boiled hot chocolate, lent Tiauna all my layers, and danced down an empty highway.

One of my goals when I rebranded was to make adventure inclusive. As in, not just for the ultra-adventurer whose closet is made of Patagonia puffs, lives in REI, and breathes Yosemite. I want adventure documentation with me to be for the ones who ultimately recognize marriage as the ultimate adventure. And will just trust me to lead them into a day of adventurous joy that speaks to who they are as people, like T & T did.

They’re not everyday mountain dwellers, but these snowy mountains absolutely make sense for who these two are as a couple…living in glory, radiant, and down for anything, as long as they’re together. @ San Juan Mountains, Colorado

02/26/2021

On mountains moving faith— why I started believing in God:

I find myself the most capable of loving deeply in the places I imagine that God spent a little extra time handcrafting the details. Maybe that’s why driving this highway feels like church to me, and playing in these mountains feels like worship. Every photograph I take is like singing an old, familiar hymn.

I went through about 20 years of religious upbringing and instruction before I actually ever believed in God. I actively rejected any semblance of faith in a higher being.

And it wasn’t a final piece of evidence, a verse, or a commanding voice from above that convinced me. It wasn’t memorizing 99 Arabic names for God that led me to believe in one. It was getting to intimately know creation like this.

It’s been 8 years of photographing and climbing and exploring places like this. My faith has become intuitive and rooted in a way that a lifetime of careful instruction and religious legalism would’ve never reached.

I think about it every time I peer out my car window to watch the light glimmer across the peaks of the Sierra Nevada. There’s too much miraculously intricate beauty in the world for me to believe in anything short of a good and loving god. @ US 395

02/23/2021

Mimi + Papa: A case study on love like an oak tree. I dream of growing into something like this far more than I dream of the cake, the flowers, or even the gown. This is what vows grow into, when well-watered and tended to beyond the romance of Day One. I love being reminded of what we’re really there for.

On a personal note, I think these kinds of photos dig even deeper for me because I haven’t had many examples of “old love” in my life. And yet I changed everything in pursuit of it.

Of the grandparents, I only saw my maternal grandparents’ marriage, and only briefly since my grandfather (Abu Jaan) died when I was young. I viewed the marriage between Nani Ama (my gma, a 90-something year old British-Pakistani spark) and Abu Jaan as “sturdy” and “functional.” Perhaps I was too young to understand the love there.

But I’ve identified as a true romantic for as long as I can remember, and I knew old, real love existed. And could exist for me. That knowledge was a big contributing reason I left my parents’ religious tradition, where arranged marriages are the norm over love marriages. I knew of only 1 love marriage in my entire extended family growing up. I know now that real love can also exist in arranged marriages, but it wasn’t the right story for me.

It’s still wild to me that I left a ton of expectations behind in pursuit of a love-led life, and it eventually led me to a place where I spend my days cultivating, documenting, honoring love and romance. I didn’t marry the person I left home for (because I also left to go to college in CA, and college won the long-distance battle), but I did learn that pursuing old love was absolutely worthwhile and in the cards.

I went from “grounded for sneaky having a boyfriend for religious reasons” to “admitted serial monogamist professionally third wheeling for photos.” It is my ultimate metamorphosis haha. My job, the photographs I take, and the connections I witness and make are an affirming testament that I chose the right path for me.

Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of “Story of My Life with Saf” maybe next week we’ll really deep-dive into my minor traumas before digging into the big stuff cool cool k cya @ Montage Laguna Beach

02/22/2021

Planned in two days and still the most beautiful. Cheers to continuously falling off the face of the Instagram planet in order to partake in more moments like this on the real planet 🌞

Safeena Noah Photography

03/03/2023

03/01/2023

04/13/2022

09/04/2021

09/01/2021

06/02/2021

05/14/2021

04/29/2021

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