Many people get excited at the prospect of wedding photography as a career. Why shouldn't they? It's exciting and fun. You get to meet and celebrate with hundreds of interesting people throughout the year, and you can get paid to do it. You get the pleasure of making art out of someone's love story. You can have a profound impact on a couple's happiness, just by capturing photographs of their wedding day. It is even possible to make a decent living at it if you have the right skills, opportunities, motivation, and persistence.Many eager would-be wedding photographers get excited and jump into the deep end, head-first, without a solid understanding of what is entailed in being a successful wedding photographer. For every experienced and successful wedding photographer out there, you will likely find two or three dozen who did not last more than a year or two. Why? Few people can successfully balance art with business.Over the years I have spent as a full time professional wedding photographer, a significant number of people have asked me to host seminars or give private lessons on the business side of this exciting, challenging, and highly rewarding industry. There are innumerable books available on the techniques of wedding photography as an art form, but few which tell you what to do outside of the camera itself. Many artists are not adept at business. Balancing the Art and Business of Wedding Photography is my attempt to help those artists strike a balance between the performance of wedding photography as an art, and the production of wedding photography as a successful and efficient business.