It’s Vintage,
Darling
While the professional photographer captures perfect portraits and carefree candids on your wedding day, photo booths give your guests the opportunity to truly relax in front of the camera, creating little keepsakes to remind them of this wonderful day. Here, Kirrily Ireland chats with Janine Haines, director of JustForKiKs Photo Booths, to discuss how photo booths can offer a vintage experience, from old caravans to props, backdrops and customisable strip templates to match a wedding’s décor and theme.
Image courtesy of JustForKiks
With Ollie, a vintage-caravan-turned-photo- booth, Haines has taken the photo booth experience to the next level, bringing a unique touch to a range of celebrations including, of course, weddings. Unlike more traditional photo booth setups, Ollie transports guests to an era gone-by, perfect for any wedding whether you’re aiming for a 1950s-style theme or something boho chic.
It’s All A-Booth The Fun
If you’re um-ing and ah-ing over whether to include a photo booth in your wedding-day festivities, just ask yourself how much you hope your guests will enjoy themselves. Photo booths are a great way to enliven the day, an extra point-of-interest to engage everyone other than eating, drinking and dancing.
“We’ve found that photo booths have the ability to turn your wedding into a major event, remembered and talked about for years afterward,” Haines says. “Everyone keeps the memories alive with all of their photos pinned to the fridge or wall and the happy couple keep the laughter going every time someone flips through their wedding album full of funny photo strips or postcards.”
Photo booths come in all shapes and sizes nowadays, fit for any venue and any theme. “With Western Australia’s 300 [or so] days of glorious sunshine, outdoor weddings at our amazing venues are extremely popular and we bring another dimension to these venues with our vintage caravan booth – it is an event in itself,” Haines says.
Prime Placement
Of course, a photo booth can only offer so much entertainment as long as it’s being used. Careful consideration of where you situate your booth is
necessary to ensure guests are aware of its existence, and don’t have to stray too far from the party to get in a few snaps. “Ideally your booth should be within a few metres of the dance floor, if possible,” Haines explains. “Setting up in a different room or at the far end of the room is to be avoided as this ensures the booth sees little use, with up to fifty percent of guests not making the trip over to the booth for a photo, and if they do it’s usually just the once for the evening. Not an ideal outcome for the bride and groom.”
So what’s the best set-up? “The best place to setup the booth for maximum effect is between the bar and dance floor, or in a triangulation set-up of bar, booth, dance floor. This ensures a snowball-type effect where guests can easily jump from one to the other to keep the excitement and fun going all night.” Companies like JustForKiKs also usually employ a couple of photo booth attendants, who help “encourage and engage with the guests to feel at home and comfortable enough to go ahead with fun poses and props” – so you can rest assured even your shyest friends will get involved!
Props And Backdrops
These days, a photo booth isn’t just a small room with a camera; to boost the enjoyment and make the photos funnier and more interesting, props and backdrops are often incorporated. Haines affirms, “We would typically bring sixty to seventy props to each event, styled and themed with the bride’s style and colours in mind, from all sorts of hats, sunglasses, [feather] boas and funny signs.”
Props are the perfect way to give your photo booth an authentic – or even corny – vintage feel. “Our most popular props are the 50s- and 60s-styled bejewelled sunglasses accompanied by a colourful jewelled cap,” Haines explains. The backdrop can do some of the talking, too. “I find that a green flower wall highlighted with coloured
flower accents is the go-to backdrop for us,” Haines explains, “although a sequinned backdrop in a matching colour theme works really well too.” Better yet, with the evolution of more creative photo booths, they may even look vintage enough themselves to get the job done., “A retro feel is easily created with such a high-end product such as Ollie,” she agrees.
Creative Templates
Once you and your loved ones take some groovy snaps with your silly props and backdrops, they’ll be printed on a two-by-six photo strip. Haines says that if you want to get the most out of your photo boot, “you have to offer a professional designed photo strip”. Most photo booth companies will have a range of templates and designs to choose from, and will allow you to customise the text, fonts and colours to your liking. “This way the client receives an amazing looking, professionally designed strip that is quite unique to their event.”
The vintage aesthetic can continue in the photo strip. “Most of the leading software designers have all types of filters that can be applied to the photos to create that old-world look,” Haines says. “Having said that, the best-looking strips will have a black-and-white theme to them, say in a Gatsby-style with a sepia or black-and-white filter to tie it all together. The look is fantastic.” Who doesn’t love a good filter?
Photo booths offer a wealth of amusement at any wedding. Putting an old-fashioned spin on the props, backdrops and photo strips will only amp up the fun even more. Pulling silly faces and playing with dress-ups while the camera flashes will not only take your guests back to an earlier era, but also to a time of pure, childlike glee.