HOW WE SET UP OUR DIY PHOTO BOOTH

I have a really difficult time walking past a photo booth without jumping in and making whoever I'm with take a photo with me. And after seeing one at a wedding fair in Glasgow years ago, it was pretty high up on the dream wedding list. But renting one is pretty expensive, especially if you want one of the cute vintage ones that make photo strips. So we thought about DIYing it, and had grand plans of setting up one of our SLRs on a tripod. It wasn't until we were in a photo booth in Glastonbury that was basically just an iPad with a booth built around it, I realized how easily we could actually do this. 

So this is how we set ours up—super simple and budget friendly (given that you already have an iPad). We already had the tripod and the iPad, so all we needed to get was the app, an iPad mount, and any potential props. For our props, we used a combination of these printable photo booth props, and a couple extra ones our friend Langy designed for us. All we did was print, cut and glue them to some wooden BBQ skewers. We also threw in some temporary tattoos, which were a big hit. Langy designed these too, and we just printed them out on temporary tattoo paper and roughly cut them out. As for the app, we ended up going for an app called DIY wedding, as we really liked the functions and the aesthetic. It's a really easy app to use, where all your photos get saved in a folder (or can be sent directly to a printer if you have wifi), you can lock the iPad from the app to restrict access, and you can customize the border of the photo strips. Graeme designed our borders with our anchor (which was heavily featured in our wedding), the date and the name of our venue.

I’m not entirely sure if I’ll be sticking these in a photo book or displaying them on our walls yet, but as we have all the images stored we can obviously print out however many we like, whenever we like. One thing we are for sure doing though is sending them to our guests. Obviously not everyone used the photo booth, but the ones who did will be receiving their photo strip along with our thank you cards. I mean, who doesn't love a good photo strip?

SAVE THE DATE!

Things have been pretty busy recently. The company I work for got bought up this year, and it's been pretty busy leading up to transition day. I've also been house hunting, and looking into whether I should buy my parents house that I'm currently living in, or find somewhere else, so we've been going on house viewings and have three more today. And last, but not least, three weekends ago Graeme and I sat down, had a few whisky sours and started planning our wedding.

We've actually been engaged for three years now, so I guess it's about time we took the next step. So we spent that evening perusing Pinterest, making plans and getting excited. The following week we started looking at venues, and fell instantly for the second venue we looked at and got it booked. We've attended a wedding fair and have two more scheduled. And yesterday we spent the day making our save the date cards. A few of our guests will be coming from pretty far, so we want to give them plenty of time to make their arrangements.

Graeme designed these using a photo I took with my Diana mini, and the fonts Wisdom Script (free/donations from here!) and Neutra Display (we also made a more censored version that reads "It just got real" to send to relatives). We printed them at home, and I'm really excited about the result. (So excited that I'm posting this blog post the day after we mailed them, so for some of you this will be a bit of a spoiler.) Shit just got real, guys!