Monday, September 27, 2010

Photo booths are back in FASHION!

Call it the new karaoke. The old-fashioned photo booth is the latest hit among party posers


They've been amusing preteen girls for decades. Now, photo booths -- those $2 wonders often found in the corners of food courts -- are moving up and out of the mall.

The old-fashioned booth is fast becoming a regular on the party circuit, thanks to its fun factor and its ability to dispense one-of-a-kind favours. Like so many trends, this one has its roots in Hollywood (Jamie Lee Curtis rented one for a birthday party and Quentin Tarantino has one installed in his home), but expect to see it soon at a bat mitzvah near you.

On the small screen, red-carpet coverage for both Entertainment Tonight and eTalk Daily regularly includes "candid" celebrity photo-booth snaps from awards shows and parties. And at the recent Live8 concert  a photo booth was there for the fans to record the event.

Aside from sheer entertainment value, photo booths allow guest and host alike to capture unique instant memories in simple strips of pictures, all for a mere couple of bucks. And while booths haven't yet usurped the traditional wedding photographer, http://www.cheekyphotobooth.com.au/ plans to equip weddings, bar / batmizvahs, corporate functions and any other event throughout Sydney.

While photo booths have provided pop culture with some memorable moments -- in 1978, Clark Kent (a.k.a. Christopher Reeves) changed into Superman in a booth supplied by Auto-Photo -- they have seemed largely forgotten in recent years. Now, they're popping up everywhere, in ads for birth-control pills and chewing gum, boutique hotels as well as films such as the recent Ashton Kutcher flick A Lot Like Love.

Along with a photo booth, the company supplies a "scrapbook co-ordinator" who arranges for wedding guests to add personal notes to the photos to create special keepsakes for the bride and groom.

Even the colourful Cirque de Soleil insisted on an old-school booth for its Christmas party last year.

The business world is catching up, too, renting photo booths to amp up the "party" atmosphere at corporate events.

The company ensures a branding opportunity by adding the company's logo to the photo paper in advance.

There's something undeniably tempting about looking at photo-booth pictures. It's a great human moment.

The history of photo booths!

Mathew Stiffens filed the patent for the first automated photography machine in 1889 and during the same year Monsieur Enjalbert demonstrated a similar machine in Exposition Universelle in Paris, France. Though these machines were not reliable enough to be self-sufficient.

The modern concept of a photo booth with a curtain, screen or other material covering the background and entrance originated with Anatol Josepho in 1925 with the first photo booth appearing on Broadway Street in New York City.

In 1925, the Siberian immigrant Anatol Josepho had an idea for a small curtain enclosed booth where people could take affordable portraits anonymously and automatically. The photo booth was born. Within 20 years there were more than 30,000 in the United States alone, an explosive growth due largely to World War II, as soldiers and loved one exchanged photos, hoping to cling to memories or moments in a world turned upside down. But by the 1960s the advent of Polaroid photography spelled the doom of the four strip that had become a fixture at arcades and drugstores everywhere.
To rent a photobooth in Sydney, Australia visit http://www.cheekyphotobooth.com.au/.

What is a photo booth?

Typical dimensions of these prints vary. The classic and most familiar arrangement from the old style photo booths is 4 pictures on a strip about 40 mm wide by 205 mm long; digital prints tend to have a square arrangement of two images above two images.
 
Both black and white and colour photo booths are common in the US, however in Europe the colour photo booth has almost entirely replaced black and white booths. However, newer digital booths now offer the customer the option of whether to print in colour or in black and white. Most modern photo booths use video or digital cameras instead of film cameras, and are under computer control. Some booths can also produce stickers, postcards, or other items with the photographs on them, rather or as well as simply a strip of pictures. These often include an option of novelty decorative borders around the photos.
 
There are three countries in the world with major infrastructures of photo booths, the UK, Japan, and France. Many other countries have mature photo booth markets but with a lower level of penetration. These would include Germany, Italy, Spain, Benelux and Scandinavia. Photo booth markets in other countries, such as Australia, are steadily growing. In Europe and Japan, photo booths are mainly to be found in places of high footfall such as railway stations, shopping centres and supermarkets, as their main use is for passports, driving licences, and other forms of identification. In the United States, photo booths are purely used for entertainment, and as a result the US is a very small market for photo booth operators when compared to Europe and the Far East. Indeed there are three or four times as many photo booths in the UK alone than there are in the whole of America where they are typically installed indoors in places for entertainment, such as arcades and amusement parks. In some US cities, photo booths may also be found in train stations and other transportation hubs, as a means of obtaining a photograph needed for inclusion in a transit pass.

To hire a photo booth in Sydney, Australia check out http://www.cheekyphotobooth.com.au/.