it’s not a booth, but it does take photos!

My “photo booth” project had been stalled for awhile, since while I had figured out the software, gotten the camera ($12.50 on ebay!) and tested it all out with the printer… it was living in a heap in some corner of an empty room.

That’s when I happened to find, among all of the other goodies my parents brought out of storage and up to our new home, my old nightstand. (Just envision it with a Mickey Mouse phone on top, next to a white iron daybed with pastels throughout the room and you’ll be back in 1992 with me) And while it happens to be the perfect height to fit all of the components, it’s a tiny bit shallow of the clunker of an old CPU that I’m using. That means I’ll need to tend to cutting out the panel in the back… and adding some wheels on the bottom… but in all it’s a pretty perfect solution that just happened to be free!

The only piece missing was a way to attach the camera to to the top of the monitor, and I was stuck thinking of solutions that were just either impractical, ugly or cost-prohibitive (this is, after all, a $45 photo booth so far). But I kept coming back to the idea of a gorillapod. I kept thinking, “it looks like it will work, but would it really?” and arguing its capacity in my head. Meanwhile, it stayed unordered and I kept trying to think of something better. Then, on a trip to Fry’s last weekend, I asked Mr. M to look in the camera section to see if we could find a solution. Lo and behold… he came walking over with the gorillapod in hand. Figuring that it had an easy returnable flip-top case (as opposed to the rip-your-hands-apart sealed plastic that’s so fashionable these days), we went ahead and bought it.

And as you can see above… it works!  Now if only I had some test subjects… or Memphis would hold still for a bit longer!