I am one of those people who often has a real trouble picking. My best picks happened when I was going with my gut feeling and made a seemingly impulsive choice. Recent example - I have walked into Nordstrom Rack (one recently opened near my office and yes, I have been a frequent visitor ever since) thinking that I might reconsider my idea of red bridesmaids dresses and have my girls wear little black dresses instead. I walked out with a perfect silk black dress from Laudry for one of my bridesmaids. And it fit her perfectly. If only I could now find the same or similar dresses for my other girls. The bridesmaids dresses saga is for another post though. Here I simply wanted to illustrate the point - I never seem to find something if I'm really looking for it and if there are many choices I feel overwhelmed and lost.

This post is actually about photographers. This is another item on our To-Do list and it has been so far trying to prove itself to be the hardest one. We met our first serious candidate at a Wedding Show at Castle Hill. Going to the fair, our main objective was to meet some of the caterers on the approved caterers list for our venue. We were also going to meet some of the DJs. What we were not prepared to look at, were photographers. Yet, when we arrived at the show, we quickly realized that this would be our chance to meet a few photographers. By "a few" I mean like 10 (I think there might have been 20+ of them there, but we only talked to about 10). That's a LOT. But, the good thing was that we got to see them all at once, and while exhausting, it was helpful to see the differences between them and (hopefully) figure out what it is we liked and didn't like. At end we didn't really figure out what we liked and what we didn't like wedding-photography-wise, but we did find one photographer who we thought had potential. I'm going to call this photographer "Judy" (don't ask me why - I never met anyone with this name, so I thought it might be appropriate - I'm new to the blogging scene, so you should cut me some slack:)).

Judy was nice and we liked her pictures more than pictures by other people. She gave us amazingly low quote at the wedding show, which was a big plus. When we started seriously thinking about picking a photographer she was the obvious first choice. By "seriously thinking about picking a photographer" I mean "okay, we really should start looking for a photographer NOW!". We asked my FFIL (for those unfamiliar with wedding acronyms this stands for "future father in law") to look at the pictures by photographers we met at the wedding show and he thought Judy's pictures were the best. He too was not thrilled by the trendy "artsy" blurry pictures that seemed to be very popular among wedding photographers we met. We were almost ready to settle with Judy since she was nice, we liked her pictures (well, some anyway) and the price was good; yet, something didn't quite feel right for me about this choice. Maybe I just wasn't ready to settle without more research. Funny enough my sweetie was the one who was going "maybe we should just book her?" and I was saying "no! we need to investigate more!". He is the one who is into photography. Hey, some of his pictures are way better than the pictures by some "professional wedding photographers" we looked into!

I was trying to be a good consumer and make educated choices - so we asked Judy for references. She didn't give us any saying that she prefers not to give the names of the brides out. I thought it was reasonable, but since there were no reviews about her online, it was also very unsettling for me. Absence of references and her unresponsiveness to emails made me even more unwilling to settle. We met with her again, and after talking to her we were ready to book her on the spot - but we wanted to see references (we mentioned the absence of references as a frustration factor) first. Judy said she'll ask one of the brides to write us... A week later we still haven't heard from anyone with a review of her work. Judy also never sent us the names of videographers that she promised to send us (twice) after we reminded we would love to have them (thrice). This was the point I was ready to move on and start seriously looking for an alternative.

Oh, I took it seriously. Don't mess with Ksusha when she's on a mission! Okay, it wasn't so serious, but I did look at quite a few photographers. Few things I figured out:

• Wedding Wire, while useful place to look for reviews, is not very useful when trying to find a photographer - since there are hundreds of them in Boston area!
• Asking your FI (another wedding acronym - stands for "fiance" :)) to help is useful. Although since I was the one who wasn't going to settle with the previous photographer I felt like I have to put real effort into finding us some alternatives
• It is really hard to narrow down you choices even if you don't like most of what is offered. Most times you still waste a lot of time going through pictures by someone just to conclude "I am really not into this style!"
• Flash websites are .... special ... And I only say that because I don't want to curse on my blog (yet anyway :)). They are sure pretty. But when all you want is to see as many pictures as you can in as shortest time as possible a flash site is excruciating.
• This website has proved to be useful - thanks to Erik for finding it - alas we didn't find our photographer there. We found photographers we liked there - Team Yu, but there were booked for our date.
• The winner was my favorite wedding site - Weddingbee! I found[a board on Boston vendors][] there and methodically googled all the photographers on it. This is where I actually got best quality leads.

By now you probably want me to cut to the chaise. Did we find a photographer? Yes! And in case you didn't hear me - YES! YES! YES!

But I can't tell you who it is yet. I'm afraid to jinx it. Wait till we send them a check and secure our date and then I'll tell you all about them (yes, we got not one but TWO awesome photographers)! Are we lucky or what? :)

Do you ever think that too many choices make things worse? Do you like researching a vendor/new appliance/etc.? Did you ever make an impulsive buy of something big and found that it was the best decision you ever made?