the things we think but do not say

Last year at Halloween, Sara and I hosted a party where I created a photo booth for our guests. I wanted to thank everyone for making such a great effort for their costumes but it was also a way to get a chance to experiment with some lights. That weekend was my first experience with rented lights (from Calumet, natch). Well, I’m glad to say I’m a lot more experienced and I got asked a few months ago to try a reprise of the photo booth at a friend’s wedding.

Photo booths can come in all manner of forms. Some are small little box-rooms complete with swiveling stools and curtains. Some are fully manned, ‘booths’ that have a photographer carefully operating them for guests. But the one that I saw that opened my eyes to the whole concept was at a wedding in Martha’s Vineyard, by a photography by the name of Joe Mikos. A terrific wedding photographer btw. Joe set things up so that any guest could take a seat in a special room and shoot photos of themselves for fun with a camera setup on the other side of the room. The experience was enlightening. The shutter was triggered by the guests and everyone gets to pose and look silly. Endless fun.

But there was one aspect that I thought was lacking in the setup I saw. Even though the camera was digital, there was no visual feedback for the guests. You just had to take it for granted that the shots turned out ok. You’d see the photos eventually by contacting the bride and groom, or if you’re willing, through the photographer.

To me, this looked like an easy design opportunity to give the guests that vital piece of feedback. At the Halloween party, I set up the camera to record directly into my laptop and then I simply turned it around to face the people. Pretty obvious really.

Now, I’m hardly an expert so I’m sure that you can probably go about things in a smarter way, but I will try to recount my steps as best I can. And before it gets too confusing, I’m going to be using the words, ’strobe’ and ‘flash’ interchangeably throughout. Same thing, two different names.

Ok, so the setup does requires a fair bit of kit some not so expensive, some kinda expensive.

1. A digital camera or a digital SLR that lets you fire the camera remotely and that has software available that let’s you record your images directly to a laptop. Nikon and Canon digital SLRs have all this in spades. This process is sometimes called ‘tethered shooting’ by some photogs and it’s often used to let art directors (or in this case, drunken guests) view the images as they are being taken.

2. A strobe/flash or two. This can take a wide variety of forms from off camera flashes like the Nikon SB-800 or the Canon 580 EXII, a large soft box, or even a ring flash. I like to rent my lights from Calumet as light are pretty expensive. I’ll assume that you can set them up. I just asked my rental guy at Calumet to run through it all with me.

3. A way for the camera to trigger the strobes/flashes. I’ve only ever had excellent results from with Pocket Wizards (which work by radio which means there’s no line of sight issues) so I would happily recommended them. They are expensive but there’s more than a few ebay knock offs. Just search for ‘wireless radio trigger‘. The cheapest, non Pocket Wizard way is to use a long sync cable for your camera, but you’re probably going to have to make sure you’re got a Wein-Safe-Sync-thingy to make sure you don’t accidentally fry your camera. Radio triggers never have that problem.

Remember this bit does not trigger your camera, only the flashes. To trigger the shutter on your camera go to the next step.

4. The actual remote that fires the camera itself usually comes in two common forms. Many consumer SLRs (like the Nikon D70, 50, 40 etc) have a IR port on the front of the body which can take a IR signal from a tiny little remote which is very affordable (< $20). If you look carefully, you can see it in hands of the photos in this post. I hear that a universal TV remote can even work. Since it's IR it need a good, clear line of sight for it to work. Usually not a problem, just something to be aware of.

The other kind of remote is usually only used on professional DSLR camera bodies, like the Nikon D200/300, D2x/D3, or the Canon 1 Series cameras and the 5D. A port on the front of the camera takes an electronic signal from a little hand held trigger. They're usually branded Canon or Nikon and usually expensive. For some reason, the same type of IR remote for the non pro cameras that were only $20 are now really expensive at $330 for the pro camera bodies.

While no less expensive, but certainly more versatile is employing a Pocket Wizard as your trigger. Now this bit gets confusing.

To get the PW in your hand to trigger the camera, you've got to get a cable that runs from another Pocket Wizard that's sitting on the hot shoe of your camera. You've got to run a cable from the hot shoe mounted PW into a special port on the front of the camera to trigger the shutter. While renting Pocket Wizards is usually not that expensive ($15 a piece) this bloody cable that fires these professional body cameras is not rentable and over $100! Remember, if you do go down this route, you're now looking at renting/owning three PWs: one for the trigger, one for the camera and then one for the strobes.

5. Ok, now this might not be totally obvious, but where you position your laptop will have a huge impact on your photos. The whole point of this kind of setup is so that the feedback from the laptop lets each guest really nail the shot they want. Seeing each shot immediately after each shot encourages a lot of experimentation. When I did my first photo booth, I setup my laptop just somewhere off and to the side of my camera, sitting on a stool I think. I had no idea what a problem this would eventually become. Once a guest saw their photos being replayed on the laptop screen, their eyes were constantly drawn to the screen. You couldn't get them to look at anything else, and especially not at the lens! So, for a lot of the photos from my first party, everyone's eyes were pointing down and to the left of the image. Once it happened, no retraining was going to fix it.

So this time, I wanted to be sure to position the laptop so that it was as close to the lens as possible. And there’s really only a few places that this could mean; either directly above, to the side or below. After trying out all the options, I found to my surprise that setting the laptop just below the lens worked the best. This time around, all the guest eyes look like their looking directly into the camera, when in fact their eyes are glued to the laptop screen.

To position the laptop, I used another tripod and bought myself a “laptop plate”. I had no idea these things existed, but Manfrotto makes one. I got mine for $40 at Calumet even though this link says it’s $100. Its basically a cast iron plate with a reversible 1/4″ and 1/8″ screw thread on it. Heck, anything that you can adjust as a flat level platform will work here.

6. One additional thing that I developed for the booth at the wedding was the use of an LCD projector hooked up to the laptop. By relaying the images from the laptop to a space outside the booth, everyone else got to see what was going on in the booth. It just got even more people thinking of what to do when it was their turn.

Ok, so with that long list of stuff to get, here are the steps for setting up the photo booth:

1. Download or install the software that lets you record your images directly to your laptop. The two pieces of software that I have experience with, is Nikon’s Camera Capture Pro and Canon’s EOS Utility. Nikon’s software is an additional expense to the camera while Canon’s is shipped with it’s DSLRs. If you’ve got a Nikon camera, I’d recommend going here and testing out their 30 day trail. If you’re sneaky like me, you could try starting your 30 day trail the same month your wedding is scheduled…

The software is should be pretty self explanatory but the thing to get right is setting where the files are being written to (your desktop, an external hard drive etc) . Watch out though for a step where you might have to tell the software to open an application to view the images. Canon uses a separate application to view the images called ZoomBrowser EX.

2. Connect the USB cable to the laptop and to the camera. Test out a shot to make sure each image is writing to the laptop and the image is reviewing on screen afterwards.

3. Mount the camera onto a tripod and frame the shot with a test subject (or use yourself if you’ve already got the remote working).

4. Activates the strobes and test fire your flashes directly (no need to confuse matters yet with Pocket Wizards or sync cables).

5. Attach a Pocket Wizard to your camera’s hot shoe mount.

For small flash units like the Nikon SB-800 or the Canon 580 EXII, connect the other Pocket Wizard to your flash with the cable that ships with the PW. One end goes into the PW the other end goes into the flash. You really can’t screw anything up.

If you’re using larger strobes and their power packs (Profoto, Bowens, Hensel etc), then you’ll like need a slightly different cable than the one that ships with the PW. I would recommend that if you rent the lights make sure that the rental location supplies the appropriate cable.

Whenever you use Pocket Wizards, just make sure they’re both on (seriously, I’ve forgotten this step a bunch) and make sure that both PWs are on the same channel.

6. Set up your laptop on to another tripod and sit it on the laptop plate. Position the laptop directly under the lens. If you have it, connect the LCD projector to the laptop and position it outside the booth and project the images onto a screen or a wall.

7. Test fire your setup!

On the night of the party each time someone uses the booth the sequence of events should play out as such:

Drunk guest picks up the remote and triggers it with their sweaty hands,
The camera receives a signal and the shutter on the camera is released,
Simultaneously, the Pocket Wizard mounted on the camera sends a signal out and fires the strobe(s),
The camera’s sensor records an image and the file is written directly to the laptop,
The laptop displays the images on the screen,
The drunk guest is amazed at the feedback and tries the shot again!

Many thanks to April and Lucas Daniel for asking me to setup their photo booth. They created some very handy white board speech bubbles for their friends and family to leave messages in their photo guest book.

Lastly, thanks to Craig for helping me set up the booth this time and suggesting that I write this up.

If you’re looking to have one of these things at your wedding but are stuck on how to do it yourself, give me a shout at georgeaye [at] gmail dot com.