Now after reading up on link building I feel like I'm years away from getting to where I need to be. My question is where do I start with link building, forums, blogs, paid advertising? also how much is enough, when can I feel comfortable that I have enough links for google to notice me? Thanks
I think I'm in a hard end of things also, with trying to get a wedding photography site up with only my name as the url ( http://www.jcamden.com ). Any advice would be welcome!

Not necessarily. I recommend web directories which are good quality, and are highly ranked in Search Engines. Users search web directories, that list sites which were reviewed by human moderator. This service usually costs. DMOZ is exception, but bery hard to get into.

With DMOZ is best to submit your site, by following their rules http://www.dmoz.org/add.html and than just wait.

Don't submit to useless directories. Some of those can be treated as link farms

Secondly create blog posts,

Thirdly and this is a very good step, go to forums related to your website's niche and start contributing with valuable posts, which users will read all the way down to your signature

Buy some advertising space on some high traffic website to get some real visitors there who can start naturally linking back to your site.

Most importantly make sure your site has dynamic content updated frequently, so that Google Caffeine algorithm will kick in.