Weddings are expensive

I've been getting a little frustrated at the cost of weddings. I know. I know. This should not be unexpected. But I think you can still be annoyed about it. It's just that I feel like we are making a lot of economic choices and cutting out a lot of wedding frill, but it doesn't seem to actually save us any money. What's the point? I may not spend hundreds of dollars on this one thing, but this other thing will cost thousands of dollars. Boo.

Recently we have been on a quest to find a decent and affordable photographer. The complication for us is that we are having two weddings, but our budget for photography will probably barely cover one wedding. So maybe we should rely on the cameras of friends and family for one and get the professionals for the other. But we don't really want to do this. Both weddings have a lot of meaning for both our families, and it feels a little like we'd be making one less important if we didn't hire a photographer for both. I don't know. We might revisit our budget on this. Grrr. I know cameras and equipment must be expensive, but I am surprised at the prices of many uninteresting wedding photographers. We would be willing (to a point) to pay for a good photographer, but the prices are inflated so that the bad photographers are barely affordable and the good ones seem out of our league. We would be open to using a student photographer, but they'd have to come with high praise from someone we know personally and whose opinion we respected--not an expensive photographer trying to get work for one of their interns.
Anyway I'm trying not to stress out too much over this. But time keeps ticking away and the best photographers (in terms of quality and price) get booked early. Boo.