WIP - Photo Booth

I'm building a photo booth. I've used one several times at events and wedding receptions but it's been a camera on a tripod with a light on a stand set above it and a laptop on a table that users have had to click the laptop pad to initiate the photo. After being nervous enough about all the gear sitting out, I'm building a box to house a computer screen, micro computer, and camera. I'll post photos here of the build and the refinements I'm going to end up doing. I need something fairly secure and easy to use as it's generally unattended because I don't make the money to pay someone to stand there and direct things.

I've seen questions about this in the past but haven't seen a lot of responses on the subject so I'm going to chronicle my build here.

So far I made my first two purchases yesterday. I'm going to use some of the gear I currently have until I can afford to get everything I need.

Gear:
Nikon D70 - $98
Nikon 18-55 VRII - $87
Nikon D70 AC adapter - $29
USB arcade style button - $60
DSLRBooth Pro Windows software - $150
15" HP LCD monitor - Free (donated from the parts bin at work)
Dell Optiplex 3020m - $497
Sheet of particle board & nails - $30

Need to buy:
Flash

Spent so far - $951

I can not wait to see your build take shape, a booth is on our winter list as well, in preparation for next spring. How will the USB button be incorporated? Do you have a link to it?

Littlejon Dsgn wrote in post #17736513
I can not wait to see your build take shape, a booth is on our winter list as well, in preparation for next spring. How will the USB button be incorporated? Do you have a link to it?

It's light up LED and it will be on the front of the box. Any mouse click/etc... initiates the count down on the program so the button will be perfect.

http://www.ebay.com/it​m/272003665722

I really like that idea. I have been looking at DSLRBooth, trying to figure out what the differences are in the Standard and Pro versions. Would be nice if the website had a little side by side comparison so you know what the extra money gets you.

From DSLRBooth

I chose it over the rest because at the time it was the only one that could integrate with the iPad where the iPad can be used to share and preview photos since I wasn't ever planning on printing. That may change in the future but after looking at printers, most dye subs that would suit the job are nearly $1000 if not more. There are cheaper dye subs for under $300, but their print times are almost a minute vs less than 10 seconds. A minute isn't long until you end up with a line.

Thanks guess I did not look hard enough

I just finished building a custom photo booth myself and it had it's first trial by fire this weekend. Learned a lot and I've still got a fair bit of work to do yet, but it was really awesome to see people using the booth. My printer integration wasn't working correctly for the event ("finished" at 2am the night prior), but it turns out that most people didn't want prints anyway. The only ones who did care were the older folks, and I worked around the printer issue manually to get them hard copies of the photos. Everyone else was happy to get the photos via email.

That USB button seems awfully expensive though for what it is. I used a dumb light-up arcade style momentary button wired up to an Arduino for the start button. It wasn't completely reliable, but I'm sure they were software related (some throttling I put into the communication link). Once I get some free time to validate the code changes I made to the Arduino software, I'll know for sure. I'm not familiar with DLSRBooth, but my booth is completely custom software and integrating a usb serial read into the code was the shortest path to completion for me. I could post up a schematic and the code for that if you're interested, and the cost should be maybe half of what that button is selling for.

Anyway, I'm subscribed...can't wait to see what you come up with.

I splurged on the PC. I got a good deal on an Optiplex 3020 micro. It ended up being $497 for the i5, which strangely is not listed on Dell's website from a quick browse I just did. I know it's probably overkill but it has a 500GB drive, external VGA connection, and definitely enough power to do the live view. I'll probably end up using it for other things in the future, so I didn't mind paying a little more for it.

Nice...yeah an i5 is a lot of horsepower for a photo booth. I went minimalist with an Octa core A7 2ghz development board and it handles liveview fine, so you should be good with that setup. I tried a Raspberry Pi 2 first, but it was a little underpowered for my needs. The software I'm using is single threaded, so more cores don't help with the liveview aspect...a faster raw clock speed is what I needed, and 2ghz seems to do the trick.

Also, there are a couple of different photobooth-specific forums out there with varying degrees of usefulness...might be worth checking out just to get some ideas for your build.

I saw one at the wedding I shot last weekend. It was a similar idea to what I have but it was definitely bought and produced prints without digital content. It had the front panel which contained the camera, screen and light, with a curtain on metal rods that encircled it and it was small. I think he starts at close to $750 for a rental and that's just for the booth itself. I want to be able to provide photography services as well as the booth.

I built mine to have the flexibility of being an open air or closed booth. I picked up a 5'x5' popup canopy that I can close off with curtains if I want a closed booth design. This first time around I didn't have time to set it up, as I was working out some glitches on-site. :-/ In the end though, people seemed to really liked the open air design. One of the bridesmaids who had used a closed design photo booth at a recent wedding liked that you could fit a decent sized group of people in the shot with the open air design. I guess the closed booth design that they had rented would only fit 2-3 people at a time.

So anyway, I'd leave your options open. My biggest concern with an open air design was that the strobe would irritate the guests, as everything was in a single large room. It turned out to be a non-issue in that size room, but I could see it potentially being a problem in a smaller room. I was using a bounce umbrella to light the guests, so switching over to a softbox would probably help to minimize the booth's impact in a smaller room too.

Here's a couple quick photos I took of the booth in action...the speedlight on top of the box was being used to optically trigger the strobe since I had forgotten to grab a sync cable to connect the wireless trigger to the strobe. Like I said...trial by fire. In the interest of time, I grabbed an empty wall in the back corner of the room and used that as a makeshift background.

https://drive.google.c​om …OXB5blBV/view?u​sp=sharing
https://drive.google.c​om …QWpNRU13/view?u​sp=sharing

I've got a similar goal to make it completely self-service, but mostly in the interest of laziness. I have no desire to be a wedding photographer, but I love the idea of being able to provide this service and generate a decent side revenue stream. My only advice would be to run through a few events where you're not trying to pull double duty to make sure that you've got all of the issues ironed out before you try to put it on auto pilot. Even something as simple as signage and instructions (or lack thereof in my case) can trip up your guests.


Also, these are the photobooth-specific forums I found in doing my initial research:

http://www.photobootho​wners.com/community-forums/
http://www.photobootht​alk.com/forum/

There's some good info in there if you dig around. If anything, it'll give you ideas that you might not have considered yet.

btweller wrote in post #17744039
I built mine to have the flexibility of being an open air or closed booth. I picked up a 5'x5' popup canopy that I can close off with curtains if I want a closed booth design. This first time around I didn't have time to set it up, as I was working out some glitches on-site. :-/ In the end though, people seemed to really liked the open air design. One of the bridesmaids who had used a closed design photo booth at a recent wedding liked that you could fit a decent sized group of people in the shot with the open air design. I guess the closed booth design that they had rented would only fit 2-3 people at a time.

So anyway, I'd leave your options open. My biggest concern with an open air design was that the strobe would irritate the guests, as everything was in a single large room. It turned out to be a non-issue in that size room, but I could see it potentially being a problem in a smaller room. I was using a bounce umbrella to light the guests, so switching over to a softbox would probably help to minimize the booth's impact in a smaller room too.

Here's a couple quick photos I took of the booth in action...the speedlight on top of the box was being used to optically trigger the strobe since I had forgotten to grab a sync cable to connect the wireless trigger to the strobe. Like I said...trial by fire. In the interest of time, I grabbed an empty wall in the back corner of the room and used that as a makeshift background.

https://drive.google.c​om …OXB5blBV/view?u​sp=sharing
https://drive.google.c​om …QWpNRU13/view?u​sp=sharing

I've got a similar goal to make it completely self-service, but mostly in the interest of laziness. I have no desire to be a wedding photographer, but I love the idea of being able to provide this service and generate a decent side revenue stream. My only advice would be to run through a few events where you're not trying to pull double duty to make sure that you've got all of the issues ironed out before you try to put it on auto pilot. Even something as simple as signage and instructions (or lack thereof in my case) can trip up your guests.


Also, these are the photobooth-specific forums I found in doing my initial research:

http://www.photobootho​wners.com/community-forums/
http://www.photobootht​alk.com/forum/

There's some good info in there if you dig around. If anything, it'll give you ideas that you might not have considered yet.

I plan to be modular. The "booth" itself will set on a speaker stand and I'll make up some sort of railing if it needs to be closed off. The several times I've set one up it's been open air and I like the concept better as there's more room. When you have 7-10 people getting photos done, they're having a blast and that's something they couldn't do in a closed booth. Plus I can custom design backdrops.

I've used all the equipment together before except the new PC/button, it's just been a camera on a tripod connected to the computer and a Dynalite flash with a laptop on a table. So, everything was spread out and took a lot more to setup. I want to be able to plug this in and it comes up automatically. Windows will sign in automatically and I'll set DSLRBooth to start itself once Windows loads. Maybe I can even find a macro program that would shut windows down with a certain button press. That would be pretty cool.

I like the idea of a custom designed background...what's all involved in doing that, and what are the (ballpark) costs?

I made a box!

Going to cut the holes for the screen, camera, and USB button tomorrow. Didn't have a sawzall handy last night, so I had to stop after cutting everything. It's going to measure 26" tall by 9 1/2" and about 20" or so across.

Potato phone:

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/Areh​8D

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/zucq​m5