The first thing you need to do is set a date, right? And to do that you need to secure your venue so that’s priority number one on your todo list.

What’s next? There’s so many things, right? But let’s shift our attention to what’s most important.

I understand I have a bias here, but stay with me. I’m going to borrow some thoughts from Maurissa Jean McNellis, a wedding photographer from Minnesota, who made these comments on Facebook.

“Photos are the one memory you can pull out every day to see. Can you pull out the cake every day to retaste it? Can you smell the bouquet every day? When you are 80 years old are you going to pull out the wedding dress and put it on to remember the day?

You will look at the photos to evoke those memories.”

If you are looking for places to save money on your wedding, you can hire a cheap photographer. Again, borrowing from McNellis, “Take into account that the cheap photographers don’t have the experience that you need them to have. You can’t redo wedding photos… that’s a one chance deal. If the photog screws up senior photos, those can be done gain. wedding ones can’t be redone. Cheap photographers probably don’t have a backup camera and lenses in case something goes wrong with the main body. Then you get no photos. You may also get eyes that are not sharp. Do you chance blurry dark photos because your “cheap” photog does not know how to compensate for varied shooting conditions? “

She went on to talk about how she was where you are right now and she chose the less expensive photographer. She did get sharp images but not nearly what she had hoped for. So now she pays the price for trying to save money on photography, for many years to come.

For a wedding, a lot of things are essential. For the rest of your life, good photography at that wedding is a top priority.

Will you remember how the cake tastes or how the photos look?