If you’ve checked out my last two posts, you know I mentioned our Super Bowl photo booth that we setup for the big game. It was a last minute decision, so to speak, so we were scrambling a bit to find decorations and props. You’d be surprised how hard it was to find game day themed decorations on the day of the game. I don’t know if it’s just that stores didn’t have them at all or if they didn’t have them in stock because it was the day of the game. Regardless, it was a challenge and we didn’t have a lot of time to stop at a lot of stores. Next year, I’ll be better prepared and start shopping for props and decorations much earlier.
If this is something that you think, “Hey, that’s a lot of fun! How can I do that at my party?,” it’s pretty simple to do. I have actual backdrop paper, but you could easily set this up in front of an open wall. In fact, one of the issues I ran into was with our group shots. The backdrop I have isn’t really wide enough for more than two or three people to stand in front of it. We had to move the camera a lot farther back and then you could see the walls and what not off to the sides. I wasn’t terribly worried about it this time since these were just some fun shots that I was doing for personal use, but if I were to do something like this for a major event, it would definitely be a concern and I’d probably have at least found an open wall to shoot the large shots in front of as a temporary solution. Anyway, once I had my backdrop setup, we ended up draping some red, white and blue streamers over the top of the backdrop. I found some blue foil stars that I scattered around the backdrop. The majority of the party goers were Patriots fans, so when I couldn’t find Super Bowl themed decorations, I opted to just go with a Patriots scheme. Luckily, we have an inflatable Patriots guy who served as our main prop for the booth. He also became the butt of some deflate gate jokes throughout the photos, as you’ll see below.
I used my Nikon D4 with a 50 1.8 lens and my SB-600 flash pointed up at the ceiling to bounce the light. You don’t necessarily need a fancy camera to do something like this though. If you’ve got a point and shoot or a decent camera phone, that would work too. It’s all about the lighting here. You want enough light that you don’t end up with blurry or underexposed photos, but not too much light that it looks harsh on the subjects in the booth. We setup the booth in the kitchen where the table would normally be, but what you don’t see in my shots is that there’s actually a lamp hanging from the ceiling that I didn’t use. Why didn’t I just use the lamp, you ask? A couple of reasons. First of all, it wouldn’t have thrown off even light onto the people standing in front of the backdrop. The biggest reason was that because it’s above them, I would have gotten some blown out highlights on their heads and parts of their faces and it wouldn’t have hit the people or the backdrop evenly. What you can’t see from the pictures is that the room was actually pretty dark in general. I used only my flash to light the scene, which gave a nice, even lighting.
So there’s the step by step on how you can setup your own photo booth. Now let’s take a look at the pictures. Remember, I said there were a lot of deflate gate themed photos here, so brace yourselves.
We did two group photos. This first one was our halftime photo. Remember, I mentioned that my backdrop wasn’t wide enough for this many people, so unfortunately, you see everything else around it. You can also see the top of the ceiling lamp that I was talking about earlier having down in the top right of the photo.
That’s yours truly down in the front with the Gronk jersey. My friend Alex didn’t want to be in the photo, so she took the picture for us.
This was our post-game photo. My neighbor left just a little bit into the third quarter because it was getting late and my sister-in-law had been putting my niece down for a nap, so we wanted to get another shot with Claire and Caitlyn. We also wanted to get a post-game 4x Super Bowl champions shot. By this point, my friends Jon and Alex had also left because they had a bit of a further drive home than everyone else, so I just setup the timer on my camera. We did a few shots with the timer to make sure we had one where no one was blinking or looking at someone else and ended up with this.
So there are my photo booth shots from this year’s Super Bowl Party. If you decide to do your own photo booth for an event, I’d love to see some photos and hear about your experiences. Be sure to post them over on my Facebook page!