Weddingbee boards

We had a DIY photo booth at our wedding and it was like the coolest thing I've ever seen. We built the entire thing ourselves and used a spare flat screen tv that we had, as well as a HD camera and a laptop (both secured to the structure so they couldn't be removed without making a scene).

I have to run out but I'll post more about it later.

Ok, so here's the basic jist of our photo booth. Unfortunately our photog didn't get any pics of the actual booth so all I can show are the bits and pieces that we documented along the way (which is like a picture or two). It really did turn out incredible...

We built 2 seperate walls that would end up facing each other. The first wall was 4'x7' and housed the TV, camera and macbook. We cut out a square large enough to mount the TV (37" flat screen) and made a frame around it using scrap wood, which was later painted. The camera was mounted ontop of the TV in a way so that our guests could adjust the height if needed (our guests ranged from 3' to almost 7') but they couldn't remove it. We built a shelf into the back to house the laptop that was running our custom photo booth software (DH is a mac developer so he wrote the software that we used). We drilled a small hole in the wall that lined up with the sensor on the laptop so that the remote would work. Both walls were reinforced with collapsible legs for east transport.

The second wall was 6'x7' and that was used as our backdrop. Both walls were designed to look like we were in a living room with modern wallpaper, crown molding and white wainscotting. We set the walls up about 7-8 feet apart so that we were able to maximize the amount of people we could fit in a frame. The traditional photo booths are nice but you can hardly fit anyone in them. We were able to get upwards of 12 people into ours!

We purchased a few coordinating curtain panels and rods and installed those for added privacy. We felt that our guests would be more comfortable if they could take their pictures without being on display so the entire booth was draped in curtains.

Everything was controlled by apple remote. DH set it up so that the main button on the remote took the picture (needed to make it as fool proof as possible). When our guests stepped into the booth, their image would be on the TV. When they were ready to take the picture, they would click the button and the screen would count down from 3 and then snap the photo. It would stay on the screen for a few seconds before going back to camera mode to take more pictures. We could have enabled a video mode as well but we were worried switching back and forth may be too technical for some and DH didn't want to have to man the photo booth all night.  

We had a table set up outside of the booth with some dry erase boards, markers and a bunch of props for our guests to use. Because of the way the camera was set up, any pictures that our guests took with the dry erase boards came through backwards. It was an easy fix to flip the pictures after they were uploaded to our home computer. 

All in all, it was an absolute blast and our guests loved it. DH and my FIL built the entire thing. I wish I could say I contributed but short of painting a bit and selecting the bitchin' wallpaper, I didn't do much. We've already had a bunch of people tell us that we should rent it out. We would consider it if we had a way to transport it but it requires a truck and our little sedan won't cut it. For now, it lives on in my IL's garage. 

This is the one wall about 3/4 of the way to completion...

The booth is in the background. This kind of gives an idea of how large it was...

A fun shot that my photog got of a bunch of us in there (DH got me with frosting after I cake smashed him during our cake cutting). There were about 10 people in there at the time...

Photo upload is being lame so I'll try to upload some of the actual photo booth pics in another post. 

Some of the photo booth pics...

We hadn't thought about lighting when we were making this which ended up being an oversight. When it got dark outside, the picture started coming out really dark. Our venue grabbed an end table and lamp out of the hallway and set it up on the side for added light. The pictures were still a little dark but they came out fine. The lamp and side table fit in perfectly with the living room vibe that we were going for. 

We thought that we would be able to build this for a few hundred but we were mistaken. All together I'd say that this cost about $500 to build and it was worth every penny. We had all of the electronics that we needed so the whole budget went to supplies. The guys ran into a few issues along the way which ate up a bit of money but considering this was the first time they'd ever built a photo booth before, I think they did a damn good job.