Hiring a photo booth tip #3
Check through a couple of complete photo booth albums!
We all do it, it doesn’t matter what business were in images are cherry picked for any marketing purposes, even more so on creative industries such as photo booths. It makes a lot of sense, showing a gorgeous smile, a young couple in love, a stunning view or location and so on. We live in a society that is image driven, by that I mean, the fast paced modern lifestyle often leaves little opportunity for detail.
I’ll be covering terms of contract in another tip in the future, but for now the detail I’m referring to is the overall photos from any single event, or indeed several and not the ‘cherry picked’ ones the operator wants you to see.
How will this help you select a photo booth operator?
Lets take a wedding scenario, you choose the photographer based on a portfolio of images, however as I’m suggesting here now, most of the top tips from the numerous “Bride Guides”, “Wedding Advice” and “Wedding Blogs” all recommend, forget the portfolio and ask to look at a couple of complete ‘weddings’. They’ll go further and tell you to run a mile from any photographer that declines.
So why is this?, well just like the theory of a room full of monkeys and typewriters and an infinite amount of time they could type out on of Shakespeare’s plays! I’ll leave the debate on this alone. But the same could be attributed to someone taking photos, modern cameras have evolved that within reason everyone, could, if they took enough photos, produce at least one or two fantastic shots. Sadly the rest of the event may just be a complete blur!
Photo booths are no different, despite manufacturers assurances to the contrary (they are afterall selling booths), using them and setting them up correctly at each event isn’t that straight forward. For a start they must understand and know about basic photography in ‘manual’ mode on a camera, used with the use of a professional studio flash (again a topic for another tip), and finally combined with some fairly sophisticated software, even more so if green screen is thrown in the mix.
So ask to see complete albums from a few events, most have some published on their website if they aren’t near to you to meet,, there should be no issue with providing you access to some of these. Others will have albums posted on facebook.
What are you looking for?:
Firstly how many of the photos are blurred? Is this out of focus blurred or movement blurred? How many photos are too dark or washed out by being to bright? Finally where are the guests looking? Are most looking straight at you from the photos or somewhere else? In most cases it will be somewhere else – they are looking at themselves on a screen! Long term, it’s far more engaging, unless by design (i.e. your guests are posing as if looking at something in the distance), it’s far better to have ‘eye contact’ that requires ‘looking at the camera’.
See also Photo booth hire tip #2.