Heartwarming video alert: soccer fans snapping photos inside a London Olympics 2012 photo booth were given a surprise of a lifetime when soccer legend David Beckham randomly poked his head in. The video above — created by Adidas — captures the priceless reactions of the shocked fans. See if you can spot the die-hard Beckham fan (hint: he’s young).
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Did you know that Atari was once in the “photo” making business? In 1975 — 3 years after it’s founding — the young video game company launched the Compugraph Foto, a large coin-operated machine that snapped photos and printed them out as ASCII portraits. Subjects stood in front of a monitor showing their face and then pressed a series of buttons, triggering the 950-pound machine to print out the portrait as a 14×11-inch “photo” on computer paper.
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After a tour of the blogosphere last month, photographer Billy Hunt‘s scream activated photo booth the Screamotron3000 caught the attention of the folks over at NBC Today. This past Sunday Hunt went on national television to share the joy of scream photography.
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The “Smashing Booth” is a contraption that shatters objects and snaps photographs at the moment of impact. It was created by designer Henrietta Jadin, who created it as part of a school project titled “Breaking Point.” The wooden device catapults an object at the back wall of its box, and a photo is captured by an open shutter, sound sensor (made from an Arduino controller), and strobe.
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We’ve shared photos of photobooth marriage proposals before, but how about a video? After Nick recently proposed to his girlfriend Louise in a photobooth, Louise’s father contacted the owner of the booth — a friend — to have the video retrieved(booths apparently keep video logs to track vandalism). The owner then published the video on YouTube and contacted the newly-engaged couple.

Falling somewhere in the “really cool idea” category, this fully-automatic, working photo booth is made entirely out of cardboard. Everything from the outside to the gears, cogs and belts that make up the innards is all cardboard and 100% automatic. To use the machine all you have to do is insert your cardboard token and then sit perfectly still while the box exposes, develops and fixes a silver-gelatin photograph of you and yours. Read more…

Screamotron3000 is a creative photo booth hacked together by photographer Billy Hunt, who writes,

The Screamotron3000 is an converted boom box that takes a photo when you scream. Think Rube Goldberg meets the Wizard of Oz. By using a machine, I hope to offer a window through the inherently artificial process of portraiture into real human emotion.

It’s a brilliant way to cause inner turmoil for his subjects. On one hand, a scream is needed to activate the camera, but on the other hand, subjects have a natural desire to look presentable in photos.
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Here’s another video featuring SF photo shop Photobooth and its tintype portraits. Will and Norm of Tested talk to shop owner Michael Shindler, who goes in depth into how tintype photographs are created and the science behind the process.

If film is dying, then tintype photography has been extinct for years, but there’s still one studio/gallery in San Francisco that can immortalize your portrait using this classic method in as little as 20 minutes. This video done by Cool Hunting Video shows store co-founder Michael Shindler going through the whole process, from prepping the plates, to taking the photos with a modified camera, to developing the one-off direct positive. The results, as usual, speak for themselves.

(via Gizmodo)

Created by Chris Bell, Liangjie Xia, and Mike Kelberman, Rotobooth is a novel new photo booth with a twist — literally. It’s powered by a hacked rotary phone and shoots a photo after the user dials their cell phone number. The image is then automatically uploaded to Flickr and a link to the photo is sent as a text message to the phone number provided. Check out this interview with Kelberman to learn more about the project and this Flickr set to see some behind-the-scenes photos.

Rotobooth (via Make via Laughing Squid)

Image credit: Photograph by Mike Kelberman