Tag Archives: booth

How to Display Vintage Photo Booth Pictures

Photo booth pictures are quirky and spontaneous. I drag my kids to one of the two local vintage photo booths in my town frequently with only one rule: You have to be goofy! Over the years I’ve collected lots of strips, which can be found on our corkboard, tucked in between magazines and even used as bookmarks.

The time had come to consolidate them into one place before they got lost so, taking my life into my hands, I searched through our very full garage for an old frame and found a long forgotten, oddly sized collage of frames that turned out to be the perfect place to display my pictures.

This project doesn’t require much; an Exacto knife, paper to use as background, self-adhesive photo corners, a ruler and the photos. I picked a frame, in this case the 7 x 5 inch frame oriented horizontally.

After deciding which photos would fit best I picked out the background paper.

Using the frame back, I cut the paper to size with the Exacto knife. For this frame I’d need two pieces of paper and to make it a little more interesting, I made a little checkerboard pattern. I’m using some old card stock as my background but you could use virtually anything. Just make sure it doesn’t compete too much with your pictures.

Arrange your pictures first then, using the photo corners, affix them to the paper.

You can see that after I got going, I realized my original design would not fit very well so I eliminated two of the pictures.

That’s it! Here’s my finished product.

I used a little different arrangement with each frame.

And this is what it looks like hanging on the wall. It’s much nicer than the corkboard and puts our crazy memories front and center in the living room. The variations on this project are truly endless!


How Does a Vintage Photo Booth Work?

The boardwalk in Rehoboth Beach is home to not one but TWO vintage old-school photo booths. In an arcade very close to Playland you’ll find them side-by-side near the change machine. One is for black and white and the other is for color pictures and I’m happy to say they get lots of use, especially in the summer.

A couple of weeks ago, while walking by the arcade I noticed the color machine was out of service and the guts of it were completely exposed. I only had my iPhone with me and got some not-so-great pictures of the inside.

Pretty cool, huh? I started thinking about how the old school photo booth actually works and after searching the Internet I found a very detailed description at the website for Classic Photo Booth, a company that rents digital and classic photo booths for parties and weddings. When the front panel of the machine is removed you will see a little mini darkroom (if you’ve ever used an old photo booth you probably already knew that to be the case as your pictures usually come out still damp and reeking of darkroom chemicals). This is a really nice picture from the Classic Photo Booth page:

The film sits near the top of the machine on a large roll. After capturing your crazy expressions, the film travels down the Spider and is developed.  I assume it is in here that the image is printed onto the paper because once it leaves the Spider your photo travels through a series of dunk tanks (nine to be exact).

First, your photo hits the green tanks, which contain developer. After a quick rinse in water (the white tanks) it travels to the red tank, which holds bleach. Another quick rinse with water and then it’s on to the yellow tanks for a dip in fixer. Finally, in the last white tank labeled ‘9’ you’ll find toner. That’s the final stop before the picture hits your hot little hands. In the Classic Photo Booth picture, you’ll notice a white hair dryer on the lower left part of the picture, near the green tank, which dries the paper for ten seconds before it pops out. I’m not sure if that’s part of all photo booths, but judging from the amount of time it takes for my pictures to dry completely, I don’t think it’s a part of my local photo booth’s inner workings.

It’s amazing that someone came up with this contraption at all and even MORE amazing that they don’t fall apart with more regularity. This is the first time I can remember seeing either of the two photo booths in my area out of service.  I really hope the next time someone throws a great, big party for a monumental birthday (like mine, coming up next year on 12-12-12) there will be a classic photo booth there to capture all the memories!


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