How to Shoot a Photo Booth Strip on a Film Camera

A half-frame camera splits each 35mm frame in two. Hold it the ordinary way, in landscape, and every picture comes out vertical, which is exactly the shape of one cell on a booth strip. Four in a row and you are done.

The numbers suit it too. A 36-exposure roll gives about 72 pictures, which is 18 strips of four, so a single roll covers a dinner party with room for the cat.

We would buy the Ektar H35. The Pentax 17 has a sharper lens and zone focusing, and it is a camera you will keep using after the party. But booth strips were never sharp, and a strip shot on a $500 camera does not look ten times better than one shot on a $50 camera. It looks a little cleaner.

One honest difference before you start. Booth frames are close to square, about 42 millimeters wide and 45 tall. Half-frame pictures are taller and narrower, so your strip will read longer and thinner unless you crop each frame toward square when you print.

Copy what the cabinet does. A booth seats you about 60 to 80 centimeters from the lens, fires its flash from roughly face height, and puts one plain surface behind your head. A grey or dark bedsheet pinned flat across a doorway does the backdrop job, and a kitchen stool does the rest.

Put the camera at eye level on a tripod or a stack of books. Cheap fixed-focus cameras like the Ektar H35 are built for subjects a little further away than a booth’s lens, so sit at arm’s length plus a bit and let the faces come out slightly smaller in the frame. Soft focus at 60 centimeters is a worse trade than a little extra wall.

Then hand the camera to a friend. The Ektar H35 has no self-timer, and the friend on the shutter ends up being the booth anyway: they wait for the flash to recharge, wind on with their thumb, and fire again. On a small built-in flash that wait is a few seconds, close to the 3 to 5 second gap between flashes in a real cabinet, which is a happy accident worth keeping. Plan the four expressions before the first one, the way our four-frame pose guide suggests for the real thing.

Load black-and-white film if you want the strip to sit next to a booth strip without embarrassing itself.

Tell the lab the roll is half-frame. Some labs scan two half-frame pictures as one full frame, which leaves you cutting every scan in half, so ask for individual frames when you drop the roll off.

At home, stack four scans in a single column with a thin white gap between them, and lay two of those columns side by side on a 4x6 inch canvas. Order it as an ordinary 4x6 print from any lab or drugstore. Cut it down the middle.

You now have two 2x6 inch strips from one session, one to keep and one to give away, which a chemical booth will only do if you feed it twice.

If you print in a darkroom instead, enlarge each frame until it is about 45 millimeters tall. That puts it at booth scale, and on fiber paper it will be the closest thing to a booth strip that a negative can make.

Shoot a roll at home first and then sit in a chemical booth. You will see what the machine was doing for you all along, mostly the paper, which develops itself in the time it takes to buy a drink. Check the photo booth map for the nearest working cabinet before you go, because the listing tells you whether it is up and what it takes as payment. If you live in New York, the New York photo booth guide lists every chemical machine we track across the five boroughs. In the Midwest, start with the Chicago photo booth guide.

For a wedding or a launch party the hallway setup is a fallback. If the strips are the point of the evening, a real chemical cabinet with an attendant is worth the hire, and the photo booth operators directory lists the companies that own and move them. Our guide to renting a vintage booth versus visiting a permanent one covers what that hire involves.