How far ahead each category needs you to commit, and what it costs to be late.
One photographer publishes both of her clocks on the same page: weddings six to eighteen months ahead, family, maternity and newborn sessions two to six weeks. Your Saturday went into the diary first. The fortnight around it could not have.
Everyone tells you to ask. The businesses that answer in public answer with a ladder of dates, and the ladder is what you are signing.
165 photographers here say in weeks how long you will wait for the gallery. The answer runs from a fortnight to about four months, and both ends are somebody doing the job properly.
Your venue sleeps ten. You have invited a hundred and thirty. That is a social problem before it is a logistical one, and nobody at the venue can solve it for you.
Every other supplier is asking whether your date is free. The dress is asking whether it can be made in time.
Three of the objections to a July wedding are already answered in writing, by the people you would be buying from. The fourth one is at the family dinner, and it is the one that stops people.
Asking eighty people to buy a flight is a decision you make on their behalf and they pay for.
