Project Life 2015: Week 44, Part 4

 So... what do you do to entertain 15 8th grade girls during a birthday party at your house?  First off, you feed them Chipotle... I can't believe how excited the girls were when they came upstairs and found a Chipotle catering set up.  It was perfect!  Second... you set up a photo booth.  By the end of the party, the girls had taken 1,008 photos.  I did buy some props, but since they were all still in the costumes from the Halloween party at school, they didn't use many of them.

I'll give you a brief run down of how I did this and if you want more details, let me know.

1.  Backdrop - this I owned already.  Back in the day (like 10 years ago) I briefly played with the notion of being a portrait photographer and bought a few basic supplies.  I dug this backdrop stand and black backdrop out of some boxes in the garage.

2.  Lights - last time I tried this, I used my external flash.  The results were really dark, but fixable in PS.  I didn't want to have to edit photos this time, so I decided to buy a cheap set of studio lights off of Amazon.  They were definitely worth it.  The color cast is a little off, but I probably could have adjusted for it if I had wanted to mess with it.

3.  Camera set up - I used my Canon 5d, with my wide angle lens (20mm, 2.8).  I set the exposure manually and left it alone.  With my lights purchase, I also added a cheap tripod and a wireless shutter remote.  I did spend money on the equipment for this set up (~$100), BUT it was still way under what we would have spent to host a party for 15 girls at some outside venue.

4.  Photo delivery - thankfully every girl at the party had an iPhone.  Clara set up a shared iCloud album for the photos (free).  I had two memory cards, which I went down and switched out periodically.  I have a Mac, so the next part went really smoothly.  I would download the photos to my computer and then batch processed them with a saved for the web action that I wrote.  Once they were resized, I uploaded everything to the iCloud album.  The girls were all instantly able to see all of the photos and download the ones they wanted.

5.  Props - since it was around Halloween, we went with that as a general theme.  The girls used very few of the props I bought but what I bought, I was able to get at the dollar store by shopping early in the month.

That's basically it!  Please let me know if you have any questions about anything!

Oh... and the scattering of scrapping supplies came from Storyteller Kenner by Just Jaimee.