Having our very own photo booth is something we've wanted ever since we saw Dave Navarro's vintage booth in a very old episode of Cribs. Home Hacks shows us that it doesn't take much money or muscle to build your very own, but here's how we would upgrade it.
What You Need
- Mac Mini
- Cheap LCD display
- Aperture 2 or 3 (if your camera supports tethered shooting)
- EyeFi wireless memory card (if your camera does not support tethered shooting)
What to Do
My favorite part of a traditional photo booth is that after a few minutes of waiting for the film to develop you have something to show off to your friends. While Priya, Jandra, and Ruella got the DIY photo booth just right, their set-up requires people to wait until the camera's photos are uploaded to a computer before they can be shared. Not so great for those of us that need immediate gratification.
One way to speed up the sharing process is to set up tethered shooting. Most dSLRs and some compact digital cameras have the ability to take photos while connected to a computer. As a result, just snapped images automatically upload to the computer's hard drive and are displayed on the computer's screen.
The idea here would be that the digital camera inside the booth would be tethered to a Mac Mini running either the camera's bundled tethered shooting software or Aperture 2 (or the new Aperture 3) which supports tethered shooting. As people snap photos of themselves in the booth, the photos appear on an inexpensive LCD hung on the exterior of the booth.
Partygoers waiting to take their own portraits would be able to look at the photos being taken or flip through the night's highlights without having to wait for the host to upload the photos themselves.
For cameras that don't support tethered shooting there's EyeFi. This wireless memory card uses your home's WiFi network to automatically upload photos to your computer as you take them. You select where the photos are uploaded, but will have to figure out how to create an automatic slideshow on your own. You could easily do this by creating an Automator workflow on the Mac Mini.
Since we're not PC aficionados we won't attempt to explain how this can be done with a Windows machine, but we're hoping our fellow Unplggd readers will share their PC solution.
(Image: top, Priya, Jandra, and Ruella; collage, Apple and EyeFi)
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Comments (2)
I built a photobooth for my sister's low budget wedding. I used an old Powershot A20, an Ubuntu machine, a 4x6 photo printer from Craigslist, and a USB panic button that I bought off eBay. A shell script got fired off when the panic button was hit that
1) used gphoto to take 4 photos
2) used imagemagick to stack them into 2 strips of 4
3) uploaded them to Flickr
4) sent them to the printer
Guests got a strip to keep and my sister and brother-in-law got one for their photo album.
It took a fair amount of Googling, a pretty good knowledge of Linux (installing packages and scripting), a lot of patience, and some jury rigging (for instance, I had to line a webcam up with the actual camera to get a live preview image), but everyone was very impressed with the results.
This is a good idea, but you can do it a little simpler if you have an older Canon powershot. Certain ones are accessible via their SDK (like what natabat did).
I made software to do exactly this for a photobooth (which we sell now - www.seemonkey.net), and it's a bit cheaper. You can use any old XP laptop, older powershot cameras (I just picked another one off criagslist for $20), and any old printer. It works well, since it's all automated, and the results come out great.
There's a few others out here (search David Kline for a mac example). There's also some webcam-only versions, but the quality isn't that great (even with the better webcams... they just don't have the dynamic range of even really-old digicams, and tend to look washed out).
So a bit of software could save you some hardware costs and a whole lot of time. If you're into hacking, I'd recommend going natabat's route with gphoto, or pickup the Canon SDK and make on yourself. It's tedious and frustrating, and also completely fun!