Worked a wedding photo booth for Limelight Photobooth last night and had a blast! I’m as surprised as anyone by how much fun the photo booths are but they’re a HUGE hit. The wedding coordinator even shut us down during the first dances because it was such a big distraction.

The key to these photo booths are props. People love them. Probably 99-percent of the people going through photo booth use props. And you pretty much know you have a hit when the wedding photographers and videographers are all gathered around shooting guests at the photo booth because it’s so visual. Oh — and that last photo on this post is the wedding photographers (Autumn Rose Photography) getting in on the fun.

So just like a traditional photo booth, guests get print outs right away. For this event, we put one print in an album the guests can sign. That album goes to the bride and groom at the end of the reception. Then a couple of other prints are made and the guests get to take home those prints. The difference between this and a regular photo booth is that there’s an actual photographer shooting the photos. So instead of a timer, you can take your time coming up with poses and making sure that decisive moment is captured — something not possible with a regular photo booth.

Anyway, I know it probably seems strange that a commercial photographer who specializes in swimwear would be working a photo booth. But honestly, it’s so much fun! If you have an event — a wedding, a corporate party, a bar mitzvah, etc coming up, you really should check out Limelight Photobooth. Your guests will love it, I promise!

Portland Photographer Pete Springer

Here’s a touch of my personal side. I absolutely love black labs. Looked at some four week old lab puppies today and shot a few clips of video. My apologies to Bruno Mars for swiping your song but it’s all meant as a parody with no commercial intent.

Portland Photographer Pete Springer

It’s Britney bitch! Portland Oregon June 28, 2011. For those who don’t know, I’m a big fan of Britney. Her performance tonight didn’t have the pizazz of her Circus tour but I didn’t personally expect it to. Circus would be a tough tour and album to top. Anyway, tonight I was stoked to see her perform “3″ since that wasn’t part of the circus tour. And of course “Till The World Ends” was a fantastic finale. I’ve seen Britney perform better but she was still awesome to see.

Shot these with a G9. Also shot some HD video but it’s late and the clip I edited is having audio issues so you get stills for now.

Pete Springer Photography, Portland

Photo of belly dancer Labibah shot using natural light. We did action/dance photos and other shots too. One great aspect to shooting belly dancers is they are well aware of their bodies and always create really nice curves in their poses. From a photographer’s perspective, this a HUGE plus. It almost always makes for a better photo when things are curvy rather than straight.

Pete Springer Photography, Portland

Lil’ confession to make — I’ve been quite enjoying shooting photo booth jobs lately. There’s work involved of course, but the setting is usually some sort of party. Meaning the guests are usually relaxed and they’re getting a fun, cool series of four photos printed out on the spot so everyone wants to get photographed.

I shot a wedding reception photo booth for Limelight this weekend and two strangers came up to me and shook my hand and thanked me afterwards. They liked it that much.

Photo above is not from that wedding reception. It’s from an event a week ago. The jumper is Sara who works the photo booth events with me. Gotta test everything out once it’s set up, right?

Portland photographer Pete Springer

Pete Springer
Photographer
Portland, OR

(503) 936-9121

Pete’s photography page:
petespringer.com
Pete’s photography blog:
petespringer.biz
Pete’s photography facebook page:
facebook.com/petespringerphotography

Today’s post is intended for contact information and the search engines. It’s marked up with microdata based on info from a super cool SEO site. Schema.org is a collaborative project by Bing, Google, and Yahoo! It’s definitely worth checking out if you happen to be a SEO geek like me. It’s rare for the search engines to reveal how to markup HTML to get noticed. So when they do, it’s worth exploring.

My goal with this post is to get this page to show up when someone googles my name. I’m particularly curious to see if the photo shows up. I just noticed the code on the schema.org site didn’t work as clickable links so I had to add the “http://” to make that happen. I also had to strip the div tags but that may just be a wordpress issue.

Photo by Thomas Lindsay

It’s been raining so much in Portland this year that the Douglas firs are greener with more new growth than I’ve ever seen. They’re loving the cold, wet spring. Seriously, I’ve seen about six inches of growth on the doug firs in my yard since the beginning of May. For trees that live hundreds of years, that quite a growth spurt!

Portland photographer Pete Springer

Attended the above workshop/seminar by Sandy Puc and Jared Abrams last night in Portland and all I can say is, “Wow!” Six hours of jam packed information about DSLR video and every single bit of info was useful. It was absolutely awesome! Oh, and did I mention it only cost $59? And that I won a $99 wedding photography DVD at the seminar? Like I said, well worth it!

Seriously, photographers reading this should definitely consider attending Sandy Puc workshops when they are in your area. The workshops really are awesome and you will learn loads!

Portland photographer Pete Springer

Hotels always seem to have their own character and often it’s the details that define the hotel.

The Waldorf is a decent hotel if you’re feeling adventurous while visiting Vancouver BC. It’s kind of noisy until about 2 am though so it’s really only a place where you want to stay one night. But that one night can be fun if you play it right. There are two bars and a liquor store on the premises. Beer drinkers used to the amazing array of delicious local suds in Portland will be disappointed though. Canadian beers aren’t always very good and they’re often in aluminum cans instead of bottles.

The staff at the Waldorf is very cool though and there were art installations in a couple of rooms in the hotel. Oh — and they offer discounted rates if you check-in after midnight.

Portland Photographer Pete Springer

Really Right Stuff L-plate for Canon 5D DSLR camera body for sale, $100. Add $10 shipping/credit card processing fee if outside Portland-metro area.

This is the absolute best quality L-plate you can buy. RSS is renowed for their high quality products. L-plate sells new from RSS for $183 (plus shipping) so you’re getting L-plate for almost 50-percent less than it sells new.

Portland photographer Pete Springer