I’m making a photo booth for one of my favorite local businesses, VAIN, a hair salon in Seattle with locations downtown and in Ballard.  Building off of the popularity of the McLeod Photobooth, I’m gonna take the general idea and upgrade it to use a better camera and to have more social features.

Parts purchased:

• Mac Mini
• Nikon D60
• 15″ touch screen
• USB button
• Large 2-way mirror

After hooking this all up, I’m going to write a bit of software that connects all the dots.  The software will basically be a Mac desktop app that triggers an Automator script to take the picture, save it to the computer, and display it on the screen.  From there, it’ll will allow you to delete the picture, take another, tag the last picture, or browse all pictures taken.

The main differences between this photo booth and the traditional photo booth is that instead of printing out a picture for you, it simply uploads it to Flickr. This saves paper, and creates a social element around the photobooth that typically doesn’t exist. By having pictures available immediately on Flickr, anyone can browse all pictures taken, comment on them, and have a semi-live stream of what’s happening at the space at any given time.  During the 2 years that the McLeod Photobooth ran, over 33,000 pictures were taken.  Thousands of comments and favorites have been made on those photos, and now they exist as a strange history of the whole endeavor.

The photobooth I’m making this time is also going to have a couple extra features to make it more appropriate for a hair salon.  For example, having before and after pictures.  Being able to browse pictures by stylist, and by customer.  It will be encased in a large mirror so that instead of framing yourself in a grainy webcam shot you can simply frame yourself within lines in the mirror.  The camera will literally shoot through the mirror, via 2-way mirror technology.  Isn’t that cool?  Also, the lighting’s gonna be a lot better.

I’m excited about this little project.

This entry was posted by Buster on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 10:03 pm. It is filed under Photobooth and has these tags: VAIN. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.