We are having our school carnival next month & would really like to be able to have a photo booth for the kids to come & get their pictures taken with their friends. I have contacted some photo booth rental places & they are pretty expensive.

Does anyone have any ideas and/or experience doing your own instant photos? I am trying to figure out if there is a way to just use a digital camera, computer & printer and print the pictures out in a timely manner.

Thanks!!

Can you take your camera and use the school printer and computer to print on-site? If not, if you have a nearby drug store such as Walgreens, they usally can print in about 15 minutes from my experience. You can even send the pictures from the carnival via their website and just pick them up there.

You need a digital camera and a printer that accept the same kind of memory card. (You can do this with something called PictBridge that lets you hook up your camera and printer with a cable, too, but we found it much too slow.) It's even better if you have two printers and at least three memory cards (they don't have to hold a lot), because no matter what you do you'll be able to take the pictures faster than you can print them.

Here's how it would work: You'd take 3-5 pictures on the first card, then take that out of the camera and put in the second card. Put the first card in a printer and start printing while you take 3-5 more pictures on the second; then take that out of the camera. If you're done printing from first card, you can put that one back in the camera and put the second card in the first printer; if not, put the third card in the camera, and start printing from the second card on the second printer. By the time you've taken 3-5 more pictures, the first printer should be done.

(We tried this with one printer and two cards at an event last fall, and even though we have a fairly speedy printer we got behind in a hurry. With two printers we would've kept up, and you can get good 4x6 photo printers for under $100. Here's the one we bought, and I think we'll buy a second: www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/consumer/con...yes&oid=63069797)

Good luck!

We are also considering doing this at our carnival this year. I also checked on renting a portable photo booth -- $500 for 2 hours -- I don't think we could even break even.

How much did you charge for your photos? Did you make a themed backdrop? Details please!

Thanks, Pam