We Had a Photo Booth

Everyone was impressed that we came up with such a fun idea. Just goes to show most people don't spend too much time reading wedding blogs; I was worried everyone would roll their eyes at another wedding photo booth.

We all sort of forgot about doing this until a little late (I actually forgot about it completely and never got a picture at all, oops), so we didn't get too many pictures, but the ones we did get were marvelous and totally worth it. I want to have more parties now, just so we can have a photo booth.

In case anyone else is planning on doing this on the cheap, here's what we did:

I had a large empty canvas frame, so we stretched some cotton fabric on it and set it on my easel for a back drop.* I gathered hats from around the house and purchased a few random props (the sparkly octopus hat is my favorite, gotta say) to encourage silliness. It really doesn't take much.

I have a dslr camera, for which I bought a little remote (we taped it to a paintbrush so it wouldn't get lost). Most people had difficulty with the remote and apparently the general practice was to get someone else to click the shutter, so I guess that wasn't worth the twenty bucks. A better investment would be to buy lots of good batteries and make them visible. I had a large pack there, but either they got lost or they were all crap because apparently we lost camera power. And a regular point and shoot camera would be absolutely fine and possibly simpler overall.

The camera was set up on a tripod, focused and framed on the canvas. This looked really nice. At some point the zoom got messed with and the rest of the pictures have a lot of extra backdrop, but that's hardly an issue.

I knew people would want to look at their photos and it seemed easiest to let them, so we made a little sign with instructions how to view and then how to reset for taking more. I have no idea how that worked.

Final conclusion? This is fun. My only regret are that we don't have more pictures.

*Most people probably don't have an empty canvas frame lying around, I guess. Buying a large canvas is not really cheap - 3x4 is probably about $60 - but what if you did and then had a big jar of markers and everyone wrote notes and drew on it while they were doing their photos? I think it would be fun, anyway.