Do-it-Yourself Photo Booth!

What a fantastic idea. We simply had to build one.
Mr. and Mrs. Mango are already married but they decided to have a Christmas party this week and thought it an ideal time for a photo booth. As it turned out, it was very easy to build.
We like using somewhat of a long lens for portraits which requires the photographer to be a fair distance from the subject. This is because longer lenses are more flattering. (Ever hear people say "the camera adds 10 pounds"? Their photographer didn't know not to use a wide angle lens.) The lens we used for this project was only a 50mm but still required the camera to be six to eight feet away. We did not have enough room for an actual booth eight feet long. So the project quickly turned from "Photo Booth" into "Portraits taken three at a time and printed in a strip". "Photo Booth" is however shorter, hence the title of this post.
The first thing we looked for was a backdrop. Being a rather frugal mango, Mango decided to visit Value Village. He purchased various bed sheets and tablecloths for $4.99 and declared them an excellent deal. If looking for a similar deal, consider material as heavy as possible in order to block unwanted backlighting.

You may wonder, "Why not just use the flash on the camera, or use ambient light?" Off-camera lights can drastically improve the quality of a photographs for a variety of reasons. Some of them come to mind:
1) Light makes pictures sharper and clearer and improves the colour. Just as the human eye cannot pick out fine details or nuances in colours in low light, neither can a camera.
2) Flashes often produce unwanted shadows and harsh overexposed areas of the subject that appear white.
3) When mixing light from a flash and ambient light from a room, the colours do not always appear as you intend.
4) With more light, one can use a lower ISO setting, reducing "noise" in the photograph.

This is what our finished setup looked like. The background in this photo is the green tablecloth. It made a very effective (and economical!) substitute for a green screen. If you have an extra light, it may be useful to point it at the ceiling so that the light bounces back and accents the subjects' hair.

The photos required a minor amount of post processing because we wanted a perfectly black background. The "proper" method for doing this would be placing the subject some distance away from

In order to assemble the final product, we used this background from stock.xchng, rotated 90 degrees. One local photo lab offered to make 6"x8" prints. We decided to make three strips of photos per print, each 2" x 8". For this we used Adobe InDesign. We also added a drop shadow to the pictures. The photo lab could only read jpeg files so we had to convert our InDesign document to jpeg. As far as we know, the best way to do this is to export to a high quality PDF. Then, open the PDF with Photoshop and save as a jpeg. True, Acrobat can also convert PDFs to jpeg, but we had much better results with Photoshop.
This is so far our favourite photography project and we look forward to trying it out again.