Getting your wedding photo booth right: the practical guide

A wedding photo booth can become the liveliest corner of the room… or sit in its angle all evening with fifteen visits on the counter. The difference almost never comes from the equipment. It comes from three decisions made beforehand: the position, the timing and the staging.

Here is what we see one evening after another, and what we advise couples who ask.

1. The position: the most important decision

The right spot is easy to spot

A photo booth works when it is on a natural route, not in a nook you have to decide to go and visit. The best positions are, in order:

• between the reception room and the bar;
• close to the dance floor, but not on it;
• near the entrance to the room, if guests pass through it regularly;
• in a circulation space wide enough that a queue of five people blocks nothing.

Positions to avoid

• The corridor to the toilets. People pass through, but they do not linger, and the mood is not there.
• A closed side room. If your guests have to go through a door, half of them never will.
• The far end of the dance floor. The sound is too loud to talk and there is no room to pose.
• Facing picture windows in broad daylight. The backlight ruins the prints.

Reserve the space it needs

Depending on the model, allow from 2 × 2 m for the classic photo booth to 3 × 3 m for a 360° platform, with about 2.4 m of headroom and a good metre in front for the queue. Tell your venue: that surface comes out of the table plan, and not at the last minute. The exact footprint of each model is on the our photo booths page.

2. The timing: neither too early nor too late

During the drinks reception? Rarely a good idea

At the drinks reception your guests are finding each other, catching up, talking. The booth works there, but it competes with the reunions and, above all, it eats into the time when the photographer needs you. If your reception runs two hours and gathers a lot of people, it can be justified. Otherwise, keep the booth for later.

The best slot: from dessert to the middle of the dancing

This is where it all happens. People have eaten, the mood is rising, the room is not tired yet. In practice, for a classic wedding:

1. Open at dessert or just after, when the tables start to get up.
2. Peak in the hour after the dance floor opens, generally between 10 pm and midnight.
3. Most of the traffic in the two hours after the dancing starts. Past 1 am, visits thin out and the photos start to look alike, but the booth can stay open for the last few on the dance floor.

None of our plans is charged by the hour: the booth stays for the whole of your wedding. If you open at the drinks reception or the night runs long, nothing is added to the bill. What sets the plans apart is the number of prints: none on the Starter, where the photos go out by email, 150 on the Essential, 400 on the Signature. The detail is on the pricing page.

A word from the DJ counts more than you would think

A simple announcement on the microphone — “the photo booth is open, go and use it” — often doubles the traffic in the first half hour. Ask your DJ during the briefing; it costs nothing.

3. Lighting and the set

A photo booth brings its own lighting: it does not need a bright room to produce good images. Two situations do cause problems, though:

• Very strong coloured light (dance floor spots in red or green, for instance) spilling onto the posing area and tinting faces.
• Direct sun on the screen or the backdrop, early on a summer evening.

A few metres away from the lighting rig, or a slightly offset position, sorts it out. Your supplier handles it if they know the floor plan in advance.

On the set itself, two schools work. Either a plain backdrop — velvet, a solid panel, a foliage wall — that leaves all the room to the faces. Or an element of your own decoration: a flower arch, a neon sign with your names, a backdrop printed in your colours. What to avoid is a very busy backdrop: it eats the portraits and dates quickly.

4. Props: fewer, but better

The trunk of props is the first thing guests notice. Two simple principles:

• Sort them. Twenty well-chosen props produce better photos than sixty objects in a heap. Too big a pile puts people off, and they grab the first thing that comes to hand.
• Favour what can be worn — hats, glasses, boas, crowns — over what has to be held at arm’s length. Message signs usually end up on the floor.

One detail changes everything: a mirror set next to the trunk. People look at themselves, straighten up, and step into the frame far more relaxed.

5. The photo guest book

This is the most underestimated part of a wedding photo booth. The principle: each photo comes out twice, the guest keeps one copy and the second goes into an album with a line written beside it.

Why it works better than a classic guest book:

• nobody knows what to write on a blank page, but everyone knows how to comment on their own photo;
• the album fills itself, with no reminders on the microphone;
• you leave that same evening with a finished object rather than a pile of scattered notes.

For it to work, the album has to be visible: we put it next to the booth, with the glue and the pens, and it fills up on its own as people come and go. Just ask one of your witnesses to take it in at the end of the night.

6. The details that make the difference

• Tell your venue what time the supplier arrives and what access is needed for unloading.
• Check the power socket: a 220 V socket less than ten metres away, ideally not on the same circuit as the caterer.
• Put a table next to it for the props and the guest book, rather than leaving everything on the floor.
• Use it yourselves, early. When the couple takes the first photo, the queue starts immediately.
• Do not hide the booth behind the top table: it has to be visible from the entrance to the room.

If your venue is old, in a basement or outdoors, a few extra checks are worth making: we list them in the article on space and installation.

For everything else, it is all set out on our wedding photo booth page. And if you would like us to look at your floor plan and your timings together, send us a quote request: we answer within 24 h.