Santa Booth December 9

1 comment

Santa Booth

I did a photo booth setup for St. Stephens school in the Sunset.  The requirements were simple, they wanted a photographer photographing kids with Santa, and prints immediately available as folks exited Santa’s snow cave.  They also had a pretty small budget to accomplish this.  Details follow.

The solution was fairly simple, although it required more labor than similar much more expensive set ups.  This has been done before, with 5 to 6 figures worth of gear.  Here, we had 3 figures to play with.  Much of the gear was mine, but not all of it was necessary to meet the minimum requirements.

Here’s the BOM:

The school bought the printers and paper, everything else is mine.  Everything after the Eye-fi is not required to pull off this effort, but was what I used.  I set the camera to Medium size (1000×1500) Fine Quality JPEG, which is plenty big for a 4×6.  With the eye-fi card, you have to set the meter to stay on for as long as possible, I just set mine to 30 minutes and went on with things.  If you’re like me, you get in the habit of shooting, then turning off the camera.  With the eye-fi, you have to remember to leave the camera on at least until the card is finished uploading.

I kept the lighting simple, since I was in cramped quarters.  The Alienbee was above me, bouncing off the back wall and ceiling giving a really nice soft bounce look, but with a specific directionality.

So I would shoot the picture, and the eye-fi card would transfer the photo to the Macbook.  That’s the easy part.

On the Macbook, both printers were connected to the USB ports, and were set up as a printer pool which was then set as the default printer.  I created an automator application that found all images in the Eye-Fi download folder, sent them to the default printer, and then moved them into a “printed” folder.  I haven’t worked out how to do loops in automator actions, so I used a shell script that ran the action and then waited for one second and then looped.

We had two printers because the Selphy printers take about 60 seconds to do a 4×6 print.  Having two printers meant we could get out of a backlog with prints coming out at 30 seconds a print.  Regardless, it was going to take no less than 75 seconds from shutter to print.

The high labor part came in with these printers– the paper tray only takes 18 sheets, and every 36 prints you have to change the ink ribbon.  I had a herd of 8th graders who were super-tech savy and had a great time with the prints.  There was also enough of them that they could send one as a messenger to say “slow down, we’re getting a backlog”, and they even figured out that if you drag a photo from the printed folder to the eye-fi download folder, it prints again.

Lessons learned:

  • Keep the access point as close as possible to the eye-fi, the antenna is not so good, and I ended up with the access point in the Santa room, rather than next to the computer.
  • Candy canes make any photo shoot better.

1 comment

  1. Tom Dec 9

    COOL! Not just the explanation of how you used the Eye-Fi card and the scripting behind it (which is a great way to do this, and well-documented). But the lighting is also great. No hot spots, no hard shadows, and enough direct lighting to catch twinkles in eyes. Very well done.

    Neat!

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