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  JPollackPhotography 77 Days ago

  I'll admit my obvious bias as a photographer upfront, so it shouldn't be surprising that I think you should spend the time to find a photographer with the style and price that you're looking for. While photos taken on disposable cameras are a fun addition, they are no substitute for a professional photographer doing their job. Typically a photographer will take shots of the setting and details that convey the mood of the event as well as formals, candids, and partying - and you just aren't going to get those from guests at your wedding using cameras on each table (unless they happen to be photographers!).
  
  It's true that photography is definitely up there among the larger expenses of a wedding. The food and cake will get consumed, the music will play into the night, but ten years later you will still have these wedding photos as a great remembrance of a special day surrounded by the people you love. I think it's worth every penny.
  
  Jonathan
  J. Pollack Photography
  www.jpollackphoto.com

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  Michelle Ross 9 Days ago

  Photography is unfortunately really expensive (wedding photographer here). STL has a huge pool of talent in this area. I would email a few photographers that you like but don't have the budget for and see if they can refer you to someone based on your $$.
  
  Disposable cameras are a good idea, although I wouldn't assume that they will give the same result as someone dedicated to documenting your day. Another buck-saving tip- set up a Flickr group or Snapfish album dedicated to your wedding that guests can upload to.
  
  Thanks Amy! Happy planning!
  ~Michelle Ross
  
  www.undergracephoto.com

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What is reCAPTCHA?

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.