Over the weekend I debuted a new self-contained photobooth setup at a wedding I was shooting. It was a huge success, but I did learn a lot of things that I would have or will do differently.
Firstly, the setup. (I totally forgot to take a photo of it in action, but I am attaching the photos my buddy sent me as he was building the box for me. Yes, I have awesome friends, LOL!)
I used my old Canon XSi/450d with an 18-55 kit lens, mounted inside an Alien Bees ABR800 ring flash. The camera does not have a pc sync port, so I used a Yongnuo 622c transmitter on top of the camera to connect it to the ABR800.
Also connected to the camera was a cheapo Neewer intervalometer, accessed through a small cutout hole in the front of the box, just big enough to poke a finger in to press the "timer start/stop" button. It was set up like this: push button; 5 second delay; then 3 photos are snapped with 1 second delay between each photo.
In the camera was an Eye-Fi Mobi 64gb SD card, connected through wifi to an iPad Air 2, which is mounted in the front of the box. I ran the Shuttersnitch Program for display of the photos.
I had my friend build the base large enough (3x3) that it would be very difficult for a drunk party-goer to knock it over, unless one was to actually tackle the thing, which is not really so hard to imagine, haha! The ring flash mounts to a stud that we robbed from a broken light stand, which my friend fitted into a metal coupling and welded to a small base. He screwed the base onto a cross bracket in the middle of the box so that the ring flash sits just inside the large opening in the front of the box, and the metal "beauty dish" part mounts to it from the outside. My friend installed a lock that I wouldn't have thought of, and I'm glad he did, because at one point when the YN transmitter batteries died and things wouldn't work, I walked up to find one party-goer trying to pick the lock with a pocket-knife. Yes, there was an open bar....
The iPad is mounted inside in a way that allows the charger cord to be connected, and that also covers up the home button so that nobody on the outside can mess with it. I covered the front screen with a Zagg Invisible Shield Glass Screen Protector, and the back is wearing a clear cheapo shell from Amazon.
I wanted to use as little battery power as possible, because I was leaving this thing pretty much unattended during the wedding reception, although I was in close proximity to it the entire night. I ran a 3-outlet extension cord up through the bottom of the base, through the pipe, and into the box, all completely hidden except where it came out from an notch cut out of the side of the base. I used a cheapo ac battery adapter from Amazon to power the camera, and the ipad was plugged into it's charger cord the entire time. Of course the ABR800 was plugged in as well. The only batteries used were the 2 AAA batteries in the intervalometer and the two AA batteries in the YN transmitter. I used high capacity Amazon brand rechargeables and still had to replace the batteries in the transmitter once.
The backdrop was a roll of 107" seamless paper in Teal. I wanted it to be wide enough to accommodate large groups. The color is really great with pretty much anything anyone was wearing. Finally, I had a table full of goofy props from cheapo stores and halloween clearance sales.
What I would do or wish I could do differently:
Go Battery Free. I can't believe there aren't universal ac battery adapters out there in the world that you can use for anything that takes batteries, but I can't seem to find anything besides an instructable that involves soldering and dowel rods. And of course I am using the one camera that cannot run Magic Lantern. If I could use Magic Lantern, it is my understanding that I could use it's program in place of the intervalometer, and use a button that could trigger the shutter instead.
As it stands, I need to either attach a plunger-style button that will push on the intervalometer button, or at the very least put a big red circle around the hole in the front of the box to direct people's attention to it. Although I had explicit instructions attached, most of them were tapping away at the iPad, trying to get it to take their photo.
The iPad had trouble keeping it's wifi connection to the eye-fi card, still haven't figured out why. A couple of times throughout the night, I had to open the back of the box and remove the iPad to reset the wifi connection. I also had to use "Guided Access" on the iPad in order to make it unaccessible by the patrons. I opened the Shuttersnitch App, then use the Guided Access settings to lock out the areas on the touch screen that you would normally touch to exit the app. This way they could still use the touch screen to scroll through and view the photos.
I would've liked to have the option of the patrons sending their photos to themselves or to Facebook, but the venue did not have wifi available, and I don't have my phone set up as a hotspot. I may consider doing that in the future. I don't know that I will ever include the printer option. I don't know if it would be worth the extra time, expense, and trouble. I am loading the photos to my SmugMug account, and they can do with them as they please. I do need to include a stack of cards with the web address on them instead of just a sign, so they will remember where to look for the photos. Luckily, the bride is my facebook friend, and I was able to connect with most of the patrons through her.
Speaking of the iPad, I purchased a new one (Air 2) for photobooth purposes, because the one I had was the First Generation, which has no upgrade or support after iOS 5.1.1. When I looked into the software I wanted to use for this setup, both the Shuttersnitch App and the Eyefi Mobi App required iOS 7 or newer. Today, when I was looking for answers to the connectivity problem, I came across a little tidbit where someone found that if they had purchased the Shuttersnitch app on a new device, and then attempted to load it onto a First Gen iPad, the App Store would give them the option of installing an older version of the app. Before I bought the iPad Air 2, I tried to purchase the Shuttersnitch app on my First Gen iPad, and it would not allow me to because of the iOS 7 requirement. The option for the older version does not come up unless the app has already been purchased elsewhere. I tried it tonight and sure enough, I was able to use this entire setup on my old iPad. Had I known this, I would have purchased the app on my Mac and then loaded the older version on the First Gen iPad. Live and learn!!
The teal seamless background was beautiful, but I did not place an "X" on the floor to tell the patrons where to stand, and some of them must have leaned or bumped into the paper, causing slight wrinkles that had to be removed in PP. This was not a really big deal, but I think in the future I will mark the floor and cut just the amount of paper I need and clamp it to the stand. My stand is not really built for the weight of the roll, and it was buckling slightly by the end of the night.
Other than the backdrop wrinkles, the only PP I had to do was a little red-eye reduction, but this was minimal, and since the booth takes 3 photos, by the third, the pupils were shrunken and the red-eye was pretty much eliminated.
One other funny little tidbit that I didn't consider was the transmitter channel. It did not occur to me that the transmitter was on the same channel as the camera and flashes I was using for the reception dance until one woman told me that the photobooth would just randomly flash every now and then. I was triggering the ABR800 anytime I snapped a photo close enough for the transmitter on my camera to trigger it. Ha!!
Lastly, make sure the props you buy are cheap and disposable, because these people are sometimes worse than kids when it comes to the way they treat other people's stuff. There were several casualties!
You can see the finished product at http://www.jennyedwardsphoto.com
Here are the photos I have of the box setup in progress.
