Making decisions for your wedding can be a daunting and stressful task. While you have the advantage of experience and advice in making other buying decisions, almost every couple planning a wedding is a novice. How do you find vendors? What questions do you ask? What are the pitfalls to watch out for? With such a lack of experience, advice from friends who were recently married and those working in the business becomes especially important. Some couples are able to afford a wedding planner to handle this research; for the rest of us I have written this short article.

Why does it matter?
A wedding, traditionally, is one of the most important and happy days in a person's life. It is a celebration of the love two people have found together, and is shared with every close friend and relative at the same time. Months, or sometimes years, of planning go into making the day as magical as possible and few would argue that it is not worth the effort and expense. But such a truly magical day deserves a place in your memory forever.

This is what photography is all about. Not the camera or the film or the memory card or the lens. Those are the tools. The heart of photography is nothing more than capturing memories; of freezing a moment in time in perfect detail. Whether you look at a photograph the day after the honeymoon ends or at your fiftieth anniversary, it remains an unfaded, uncolored memory of the past. Even those with perfect photographic memories will tell you that the details fade and distort over the years. In the years to come, your wedding photographs are the only expense from the day that will increase in value.

But why hire a professional for thousands of dollars when your cousin already offered to snap photos? The answer to that is threefold. The first part is purely technical. As amazing as the new digital cameras are today, even their onboard computers can't properly expose every picture. Consumer systems are being forced into smaller and smaller sizes by consumer demand, and give up quality and speed in the process. The higher end dSLRs based on optimal quality all retain manual controls and require a firm grasp of photography and optics, and the experience to adjust the controls quickly on the fly.

Knowing how to take a picture, though, is no more important than knowing when to take a picture. Events of weddings are somewhat predictable, but only to those who have studied their flow and photographed them in the past. To observers

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