If you want to have a business in both wedding photography and wedding planning, find someone to partner with who knows wedding planning. There is very little overlap between the skill sets or the work required to succeed in either, so you can’t freely mix them. You would probably fail in both. You can do more than one type of photography because there is such a high degree of overlap in marketing, skills and investment that it makes sense.

You can batch process shoots from a wedding and turn around and do the same for a portrait session. You can advertise both types of photography at the same time and in many of the same places. Yada, yada, yada. Wedding planning takes as much, or more personal time to do and with either activity, when you’re not doing the work, you will be working on something to get you more work, or doing other business related tasks - like paying bills and making sure you have the receivables in order.

In short, not being complementary as businesses operationally, they will interfere with each other. Short form, you lose.

Here’s another guy who knows his stuff:

HTH
V2K1

Having an SLR/DSLR does not make one a professional.

If you don’t know that your shots are good enough and they need improving, then you need to take more classes, apprentice under a real pro, and work harder.

For wedding photography, as a minimum you need a web site, a good portfolio, and REFERENCES (not testimonials). Testimonials are not bad, especially if they come with full names and cities, but even those are far less impressive than references. You should be doing a good enough job building your portfolio that you have enough happy customers that will talk to prospective customers and tell them how wonderful you are. This is a LOT more effective than putting up nice testimonials that your web site visitors may or may not believe.

You should accomplish these four tasks before quitting your job. That should be fairly straightforward since wedding photography is mostly a weekend job. (Of course, “straightforward” is not the same as “easy”.)

I do not know about wedding planning.

Every photographer should be interested in learning and improving during their entire career, and that includes even the top wedding photographers. One way is to take seminars, some are just for a day or two, and some are for a week or longer. Join the professional wedding photographers organizations, network with the other pros in your area, etc etc. The best way is to begin shooting weddings under an established mentor as an assistant or second shooter. The tone of your question, and the fact that you are asking it here on YA, suggests that you are either very new at this, or have shot a couple as a guest and want to move to the next level. My advice is not to quit your day job just yet. The wedding photography business is being over run by people who just bought their first dSLR and believe that makes them a pro. They often undercut the established professionals to get bookings. Most of those folks last a few weddings and quit when they have a few angry couples, or even their first lawsuit over crappy wedding photos and failure to deliver the goods. If you are talented and know your stuff (photography wise as well as business) then you should be able to build your business. More than likely that won’t happen overnight. So if you need to keep paying the bills, you might want to take small steps at first and see how it goes. Good luck!