photobooth

It's not uncommon these days for photographers to want to add a photo booth option to their offerings. In the past, we've seen everything from an awesome VW Photo Bus, to a portable battery-powered option, to an Instagram-inspired DIY project.

The Vu Booth is a rig that offers yet another approach. Made up of 4 separate parts, it allows you to put together your SLR, a monitor, tripod and a wireless trigger into a ready-to-use photo booth.

They say you shouldn't laugh at one's misfortune, but a prank pulled off by BlackBoxTV shows just how silly we look when we're terrified -- and it's pretty funny. That's because these mean geniuses pulled off a prank that absolutely terrifies some innocent folks just trying to get their picture snapped by a photo booth.

Gigapixel photography is all the rage these days, as photographers all over the world compete to hold the record for "world's largest photo," but one photographer in San Francisco is participating in a very different way.

Michael Shindler, a photographer at the tintype studio Photobooth, has built a custom giant tintype camera that shoots portraits that are the analog equivalent of a gigapixel photo.

If you're planning on stealing somebody's credit card (and we don't suggest you do), then at least have the presence of mind not to hop in a photo booth with the card and several of your friends to take potentially incriminating photos. That's what police suspect a group of teens did after stealing a woman's credit card in Crofton, MD.

Here's a little bit of entertainment and humor for your Tuesday afternoon. At a recent mixer they hosted for creative professionals in the ad industry, St. Louis, Missouri-based Bruton Stroube Studios set up a slow motion photo booth and let the party-goers go at it. The above video is a compilation of some of the coolest shots.

Photo booths are seeing a renaissance in the world of photography recently. We're not so much talking about the photo booths you'll find at the mall, where you feed them a dollar and they take your picture. We're talking about little contraptions that pros are building/buying nowadays and bringing along with them to parties and wedding shoots.

One great example is the Instagram-inspired DIY photo booth put together by Alexander Morris. Unfortunately, that one required a bit of electrical DIY skill to put together yourself, so for those of you looking for something similar minus the DIY part, Photoboop may be the perfect solution.

Using just a few pieces of wood, some serious DIY know-how and an Arduino, photographer and Instructables user Alexander Morris built this really cool, Instagram-inspired photo booth as a fun extra for events and parties. Fortunately for us, he uploaded a ton of pictures and instructions so that anybody with a little bit of time and skill can put one together for themselves.

By all accounts, a job at one of the major tech or social giants is to be envied. With atmospheres focused on camaraderie and innovation, you would expect that working for Google or Twitter would be pretty fun -- and now Twitter has the office cam to prove it.

Put together by Mo Kudeki (an International Engineer at Twitter) as part of one of the company's quarterly hackweeks, the camera is set up in an oversized bird house at Twitter's new San Francisco office where it takes pictures of willing visitors and employees.

If you often find yourself taking screenshots of your friends and family while in Google Hangouts video chats, the company will soon be releasing a new featured designed just for you. It's called the Hangouts Capture app, and it lets you easily snap and save funny moments with others as they happen on your screen.

The IMAGO1:1 is the largest life-size self-portrait camera in the world. Exposing beautiful black and white self-portraits on 2ft x 6.5ft silver gelatin photo paper, it's a photographic marvel that is currently housed and used in an art gallery in Berlin.

Susanna Kraus, daughter of IMAGO1:1 co-inventor Werner Kraus, now runs the camera, taking photos for clients and exhibitions alike. But her dream is to respond to the many requests she gets from all over the world by taking the IMAGO1:1 on the road -- for that, she needs your help.

Photographer John Deprisco of Deprisco Photo has put together two fairly unrelated things and, as a result, created something pretty cool. By combining his love of old, run-down VW buses and the tradition photo booth, he's created the Photo Bus, a rentable photo booth on wheels -- available for whatever soiree you're planning to host next.

For their Chicago-based rent-a-photobooth business Fotio, event planners Nick Harvey and Theresa McMullen created a custom camera rig that looks like a vintage view camera. The ingredients -- besides the wooden shell and bellows -- included a DSLR and an iMac.

Omote 3D is a new "photo booth" that has popped up in the Harajuku district of Tokyo Japan. A project by creative studio PARTY, the booth differs from any other portrait studio you'll find on Earth: instead of producing 2D portrait photos, it turns subjects' images into small 3D figurines.

Bird Photo Booth is the world's first bird feeder that doubles as an iPhone and GoPro photo booth. Invented by photographer and bird-watcher Bryson Lovett, the hardwood feeder uses food to lure your feathery friends into closeup portrait sessions. Photographs can be snapped remotely by pairing your iPhone with an iPad that's running a remote camera app.

Samuel Cox, the "maker of things" whose Minority Report-style photo viewer we shared last year, was recently invited to a friend's wedding. He came up with the neat idea of creating a TARDIS-themed photo booth for the wedding reception, an accessible way for guests to leave photo memories in a lighthearted manner.

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).

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 14x11-inch "photo" on computer paper.

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.

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.

We’ve shared photos of photobooth marriage proposals before, but how about a video? After …

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.

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.

Here’s another video featuring SF photo shop Photobooth and its tintype …

If film is dying, then tintype photography has been extinct for years, but there’s still …

Created by Chris Bell, Liangjie Xia, and …

Protobooth is a creative photobooth by design firm Digital Kitchen that captures 3D photos rather than static images. Comprising 3 Canon 5D Mark II DSLRs, 4 Macbook Pros, and some fancy software mojo, the Protobooth simultaneously captures three photos at the push of a button, saves them to a networked hard drive, stitches them using Automator, applies a Photoshop filter action to the image, and then saves it as a GIF.

One year ago we featured a novel new device called Instaprint, a location-based photo booth that lets people create instant prints of Instagram photos by simply tagging them with a specific tag. It constantly scans Instagram for its tag, and when a photo is found the image is immediately printed out as a Zink print. Now Breakfast, the company behind the prototype, is trying to turn it into an actual product. They're trying to raise half a million bucks through Kickstarter and a $400 contribution effectively preorder one.

The Apesnake Photobooth is a novel photobooth triggered by facial expressions. Created by Che-Wei Wang & David Penuela, it detects the eyes and mouth of the subject and triggers the shutter on a Canon 1000D when they're found to match a desired expression (they chose the Manwolf face). The booth also automatically uploads photographs to a dedicated Facebook page.

For his wedding, designer Matt Frank built this photo booth that looks like …

We've seen DSLR photo booth projects before, but usually they're just simple ways for guests at an event to take self-portraits of themselves. Kevin over at I Dream In Code actually made a fancy photo booth for his brother's wedding that prints out a nice keepsake for guests.