A SCHOOL Photo Booth?!
Alright. For us here, photo booths are already common. We had it in Excelsior, and maybe other events. I don’t really know, I’m new in this high school. Well it was all fun and game—except that, I would have never thought that the day where I’m the organizer would come. And yet it did. Last Wednesday, (February 5th) we had a Chinese New Year event and we opened a small photo booth near our front gate. I wouldn’t say small, but for some reason, some people didn’t even know that we existed..
The equipments for the booth had been prepared a few days back: a DSLR camera, some photo paper, a photo booth software, and my printer (like, I actually brought it to my school). We also got some props for use—most are from school but one of my team members asked their friend to bring a snake plush—best prop ever.
A Divine Intuition
We actually knew that our camera didn’t wanna communicate properly with our photo booth software, but I had figured out why—or at least, I thought so, because the next day while I was actually setting up the camera, it decided to not work again. And under that panic mode I hypothesized that maybe the software couldn’t read the raw files that the camera sent, so we changed the output format to JPEG from the camera and then everything went in peace again.
And that was weird, because I did not recall doing that the previous day. All I did was to set the camera mode to automatic and inserted an SD card to it. Oh well, at least we got it to work.
Racing Against Time
A few minutes before we opened the booth, I noticed a degradation of our print quality after some testing. I thought that it was my printer’s usual hiccups, as the colors would get messed up after a while of printer. Oh well, it was apparently because I forgot to unlock the cartridge after it was carried here. I quickly went to do some head cleaning, praying that it would be finished before anything actually starts.
Alas, the recess bell soon rang and people rushed to our place. Okay, not rush, there were just a few, but people were already waiting. My printer wasn’t done yet, but we could still take photos anyways so it was fine. And the moment I truly needed it to print, it actually worked. Phew, that was close. Then I professionally™ hit the print button and completed our first order.
Unending Stream of People
..and the orders went on endlessly during the second recess (when the rest of the Chinese events had started). Oh boy, that was fun. But for some reason my order sentence processing skills were so bad, I had to ask my friend to repeat what our friends wanted a few times. The words were like, all just nonsense numbers to me—because yes we have 3 photo strip designs, and I don’t know whose idea it was (mine) to label our designs by numbers instead of by their color—so each time somebody comes, the instruction given to me would sound like “two two once, one two twice” or “two three two, one one two” or whatever. Sure I do maths, numbers, but I just cannot cope with these. :cryingemoji:
The Peak Event
I went to watch some performance during the peak event with my friends. We were veryy late though which was disappointing. I forgot why, probably because I had some extra photo orders qwq
Heyy it’s a booth for five!
After the event is done we all got free dimsum provided by our school..! Totally the weirdest thing to get (at least when written like this), but we did. And let me tell ya they actually tasted good.
Okay, even after the whole event is already finished, there were still a queue of people. Urgh. So then I continued to stand by the booth while feasting on my dimsums.
Anyways, let’s get to the funnier part. One teacher proceeded to come with her whole class to take a picture at our place. They consisted of around 20 people or so. Heyy, it’s a booth for five! But a student from grade 11 (I assume from her homeroom?) brought their wide DSLR lens and swapped ours with their lens and saved the day :3 I had some talk with them and it turns out that they were one of the people who managed Excelsior’s photo booth last year (2024), aha.
And No, I’m Slightly Annoyed
So yeah thanks booth, I totally like not getting any time to spare for enjoying the Chinese New Year event for myself—it was the last event for 12 graders; I didn’t get a lot of time to spend for my 12 grade friends. Sad. But I mean, taking pictures is also fun, I guess :D And hey we raised like roughly a million Rupiahs (gross)!