The booth is back: Remember the old boardwalk photo booth? It’s now the hot thing at weddings and parties – pressofAtlanticCity.com
Almost all the kids who lined up outside Gregg Taylor’s photo booth at their eighth-grade graduation dance said sure, they have cameras. Some have them in their cell phones, some have little digital models, some have both.
But that sure didn’t stop them from visiting the portable booth Taylor – aka the Photo Booth Dude, from Cape May Court House – set up on a recent Friday night in the cafeteria at the Eugene A. Tighe School.
And that brought up a question from a visitor:
Why?
What is it about the old-fashioned photo booth that’s making it a hot addition to weddings, dances and other social events these days – even when everyone seems to carry a camera (or two, or more) everywhere they go?
“It feels like we’re on the boardwalk right now,” 14-year-old Vasili Galanos tried to explain, on his way out of the booth with two buddies, who – like most of their classmates – borrowed liberally from a table Taylor keeps stocked with goofy hats, oversized sunglasses, princess-style crowns, a Barack Obama mask and other popular props. Then the kids tried to make faces funny enough to match their get-ups.
Another soon-to-be graduate, Tyler Flynn, also took a stab at explaining the photo-booth phenomenon following one of several sessions in the booth:
“We’re men. We like taking crazy pictures,” the 14-year-old said.
But it’s not just kids who are feeding this business boom in photo booths. The old-fashioned strips of pictures have gotten to be such a wedding trend that just five months after he got his first photo booth, Chris Vito of Little Egg Harbor Township is waiting for his second one to come in early July.
“It is phenomenally popular,” says Vito, a veteran disc jockey who saw how big the booths were getting at weddings he was working with his company, Over The Top Entertainment, and decided to add the service to his own business.
He’s proud of his “authentic, arcade-style” booth, and he has two weddings scheduled for the same mid-July Saturday, which explains why he needs the second one. Now he’s getting photo-booth requests on weddings where he’s not even the DJ, so he needs a second crew just to run the booth.
“Brides are always looking for something … a little different from their friends’ weddings,” says Vito, who believes there’s plenty more room for growth in the business – he figures still just one out of 20 or so couples has a photo booth at their wedding.
Nationally, The Wedding Report, Inc. did a survey last year and found about 10 percent of couples planned to have a photo booth at their receptions. The Tuscon, Ariz.-based Wedding Report provides “wedding statistics and market research for the wedding industry,” but founder and CEO Shane McMurray said Thursday he has no earlier statistics to help track how the demand for photo booths has grown.
But the idea appears to be catching on quickly around southern New Jersey. Rebecca Parliman, who is in charge of special events at Sea Oaks Country Club, figures she’s seen an average of 60 to 70 weddings a year in her nine years at the Little Egg Harbor Township club.
And “in the last two years, (photo booths) have really exploded,” she says. “Out of the last 15 weddings we’ve had, about half have had one. … That’s the hot new trend, I’d say.”
Around New Jersey, Erik Kent of NJWedding.com said his 13-year-old business saw enough growth in photo-booth use to add a separate category for the service on its website about two years ago.
“It’s actually been growing over the last five or six years, with a number of companies coming into the market,” said Kent, whose business is based in Belle Meade, Somerset County. “I know there are many of them out there, and they’re being used every weekend for weddings around the state.”
One of his advertisers, NJPhotobooths.com says it went from about a dozen weddings in 2008 to 70 last year. This year, owner Josh Lynn expects his Hunterdon County company to be closer to 100 receptions, he says.
After her April wedding in Cape May, Leigh Ann Douglass, 23, of Lower Township, was pleasantly shocked to find the Photo Booth Dude set up at the reception. She and Ryan Douglass had toyed with the idea of a photo booth for their party after Leigh Ann saw and liked one at a local bridal show, and they figured “if we had enough in the budget at the end, we’d consider it,” she says now.
The booth ended up not making their cut – Taylor says his prices run from $500 to $1,000 for an event, depending largely on the day of the week, and with a discount for schools. But Leigh Ann’s in-laws, Glenn and Brenda Douglass, also from Lower Township, spotted a Photo Booth Dude sign and arranged with Taylor at the last minute to work the reception.
“Everyone I talked to said it was fantastic,” says Leigh Ann, who especially liked the album she got of duplicate photo-booth strips, in which “everyone (wrote) little notes next to” their pictures.
“I think it was a lot more fun than having cameras on the tables,” she adds. “I have a couple of friends who told me they definitely plan on having one for theirs.”
Back at the Margate graduation, 14-year-old Steve Brown said he’s a veteran of photo-booth parties -a friend had one last year for a bar mitzvah in Atlantic City. Taylor, a retired Middle Township police detective, says he’s also in demand these days for Sweet 16 parties and bat mitzvahs, and the Tighe School dance was one of a string of eighth-grade graduation parties that kept him busy for much of the spring.
“What is this called? What is this considered?” Brown said, proudly holding a plaid hat of many colors – too many to list here – and a pair of mad-scientist-style glasses he also picked off the prop table before a stop in the photo booth with classmate Sue Greenwood.
The two also tried on every goofy face they could dream up before walking out and grinning at the instant results in the form of another strip of four pictures – one of almost 200 strips the Photo Booth Dude would crank out in about three hours at the dance.
After studying another set of his own pictures, Vasili Galanos again tried to explain the attraction that kept a steady line in front of the photo booth through most of the party.
“It’s going to bring back so many back memories,” the 14-year-old grad said, “when we look at these four or five years from now.”
Contact Martin DeAngelis:
609-272-7237
MDeangelis@pressofac.com
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