Last night we had the joy of photographing Marcelle's and Luciano's wedding. This time we encorporated a photo booth and as you can see below the guests had a great time with it!
In addition to our passion for photography, we also love playing with technology. With the photo booth had the opportunity to experiment with some cool new ideas customly built by Carpe Lucem! Nerd alert!!! This blog post is going to a bit more technical side after this point. So if that type of stuff bores you, feel free to bail out and check out the rest of the photo booth pictures.
Click here to see all of the photo booth pictures!
If you're still with us, allow us to explain a bit how our photo booth worked. After guest posed for a picture, their images would show up on our iPad to a centralized gallery. They also could upload photos that they've taken with their smart phones to the gallery as well. To make it all work, we used pocket wizards to trigger our flashes and an Eye-Fi card to transmit the photos via a Linksys wireless router we set up. We used a small "mini-computer" called a Raspberry Pi running the Linux operatating system to handle all of the backend work. It ran a customly built server application writen in node.js. The node.js server managed both the upload of photos and the web gallery.
To get the photos from the Eye-Fi card to the Raspberry Pi, we originally planned on using FTP. As it turns out, when using FTP with Eye-FI cards you must be connected to the internet. Our router did not have an internet uplink so that wasn't going to work. After doing some research we found opensource alternatives! We ended up using a python based open source program called eyefiserver. It communicated with the card and dumped all photos into a directory. We had another small program that periodically checked for new photos in the specified directory and when found, they were imported into the gallery. We made a smiple iPad wrapper app that loaded up the gallery web page for people to see their photo results.
From start to finish, we created this project in about five days so it is still a bit rough around the edges. In fact, on the drive over to the wedding, we were adding a few last minute final touches. For the most part, everything worked well but we weren't entirely pleased with the performance. Mainly, there was a bit of latency from the time when the photo was taken to when it appeared on the iPad. Also, the entire UI was written in HTML and jQuery mobile, and it seemd a bit cluncky. There also wasn't a nice way to see the latest photos ouside of refreshing the page. Anyway, we plan to improve on this system and incorporate it in future shoots so stay tuned!