Pseudo Photobooth (Kodak Blog, March 13, 2007)

NOTE: This is a “reprint” of my blog post to Kodak’s previous “A Thousand Words” blog.

There’s something magical about a photobooth.  You step into the booth by yourself, with some friends, or with that special someone… the pictures are about to be taken and all of a sudden, you hear that unspoken message to make a goofy face or to show affection to the one you love… you wait impatiently for the results to pop out… then, it’s instant smiles – a series of moments captured in time, captured forever, captured to bring more smiles for years to come.

I had been thinking about making a photobooth for awhile and last summer, I finally got around to my own pseudo photobooth solution.  While I did not make a physical photobooth, I found the end results to be quite delightful indeed.  If you do some quick searching on the web, you will likely come across the Photobooth.net site, where there is a section on photobooth projects.  You might also find the step-by-step instructions for a DIY Photobooth on instructables.  If you have a Macintosh, you could opt to use their photo booth software, which works on OS X with an iSight webcam.

So what did I do?  I was not ambitious enough to build a physical booth, so I skipped that step.  I looked into some of the computer-based camera controls – i.e., to connect a camera via USB port to control the capture taking and transfer of images via computer.  I was not very satisfied with the results and since I was not building a physical booth, I did not like the idea of having to be tethered to a computer to capture pictures.  So, to keep things simple, I decided I would try to capture a series of portrait shots of people (asking them to make silly faces) and then write a short script to take four pictures as input and generate one image as output – the final output image being three photo strips of the four pictures.  This allowed me to print three photo strips at once, as a 4×6 print.  While this is smaller than the typical photo strip that you would get from a photobooth, it saves on printing and facilitates sharing.

You might be surprised what kids will do when you tell them to make a silly face!  Here’s one series of photos that I took:

cade 1 cade 2 cade 3 cade 4

The resulting output for this series, as well as the output for another series of pictures, is shown below.

cade 1   cade 2

These are some of my favorite pictures from last summer!  If you are planning to try this out yourself, here are a few tips, to help you out:

  • Don’t forget to rotate your camera and capture portrait (vs. landscape) pictures
  • Take close-up shots of people – focus on “head and shoulders” shots
  • Try not to laugh too hard when people start making funny faces (you don’t want to shake the camera too much while you are taking the pictures!)
  • Note that you don’t have to limit yourself to four pictures.  If you take more than four pictures, you can pick your favorite four for the photobooth strip after the fact.
  • Do some tests to figure out what works best with your camera and with your subjects – sometimes it is easy to capture pictures in “burst mode” (as described in my Digital Action Shots post); sometimes it is easier to ask people to make four different poses.

In preparing this blog entry, I came across a wonderful article about photobooths by Tim Garrett, co-creator of Photobooth.net.  The article is:  “The Photobooth:  Timeless Self-Portrait Vending Machine” – check it out, if you have a chance.

Do you have a favorite photobooth picture strip or favorite photobooth memory to share?  Leave a comment or share a link in the comments section!

Posted in diy, kodak_blog, photography.