Wedding Blog

The printer I am using for our fauxtobooth is a Canon Selphy ES2. My parents bought it last spring to use at my grandmother’s 90th birthday party for a photo guestbook. Soon after the party, I claimed it so I could figure out the best way to make it work for our fauxtobooth.

Source: Canon USA

The printer is fairly intuitive to use. There’s a menu where you make all your selections on formatting and number of prints. For my initial tests, I chose a four-pictures-per-page layout. If this were at the wedding, I would have also selected to print two copies (one for the guests and one for us), but for my tests, I just did one copy.

First, I tested the two ways to print the pictures. The first way is on-camera using PictBridge. Most digital cameras these days have a little icon on them that looks like a printer. You connect the camera directly to the printer (instead of going through a computer), press the button, and it prints. The second way is by removing the memory card from the camera and putting it in the printer’s memory card slot. As you can tell, my cats weren’t too thrilled with this experimentation, but the results speak for themselves:

You can see how much darker the pictures with Vera came out; they were printed via PictBridge. The pictures with Oscar were printed directly from the printer. It wasn’t a matter of lighting either, as both sets have the same lighting when viewed on-screen. Clearly, we get a better print if we wait and print the pictures all at once off the memory card. This may not be very photobooth-esque, but quality and speed wins. We will probably just tell our guests (via signage and the camera attendant) to come pick up their prints before they leave at the end of the night, and have them all displayed on a table so they can look at others’ pictures as well.

Mr. Fondue complained that the 4×6 format of the photos wasn’t much like a real photobooth. Plus it would take more time printing two copies of each picture. So I started playing around with formatting. I popped my memory card into the photo printer and chose four pictures of my maid of honor’s son (and one of our ring bearers). I chose an 8-pictures-per-page layout and selected two copies of each of the four pictures and waited the minute it takes to print.

I was overjoyed when the picture popped out the top of the printer. It had printed just as I had hoped: the pictures were printed vertically with the duplicates next to each other. In other words, I could cut the picture in half and have two duplicate photo strips that looked way more like actual photobooth results. Behold the photo strips after they had been cut:

This uses half the paper (and so half the money!) and I’ll just have to remember to give our attendant some scissors to cut the two apart, so one can go to our guests and one to us.

Is anyone else doing a fauxtobooth? How are you getting the prints to your guests?