We’ve found that to best way to run a photo booth is to use a flash. With a flash, you can achieve a more consistent image during the day or night. We recommend a small aperture (higher F stop), which will create a larger depth of field, making as much of the photo in focus as possible.
Choose a shutter speed close to the sync speed of your flash (usually 1⁄160 of a second) to keep the image sharp when people are moving and will also minimize the amount of ambient light in the photos.
For the flash settings, we recommend using a high-power setting to achieve a proper exposure since your image with out the flash will most likely be completely black. This method will also give you more consistent color and look whether inside or outside, day or night.
Example values to use as a starting point with the use of a flash:
For some situations, a flash might not be available, no problem! In this case you will need to change the camera settings to allow more available light in.
You should set a larger aperture (lower F stop), and you may want to turn up your ISO (800-1600) for indoor events.
Keep in mind that the higher the F stop, the larger the area that will be in focus in the image. the lower the F stop, the more blurring you’ll see when objects move out of your in-focus point.
Ambient Light (indoor) Example Settings:
Ambient Light (outdoor) Example Settings:
For photo quality, we support any JPEG-only setting. We do not support RAW capture and you must not choose a JPEG+RAW setting. You may notice that the larger the JPEG setting, the longer it takes to fetch the image from the camera to display the preview. Choose a size that makes the most sense for you and your clients.
We highly recommend you do not rely on auto-focus during your event. Use auto or manual focus to get things in focus before the event begins, then switch it to manual focus. If you use auto-focus for each photo taken (especially when using a high-powered flash), there may not be enough light for the camera to auto-focus at all, which will cause the capture to timeout and an error to display on-screen. Even if it is able to focus successfully, it can take up to a second to do so, which will throw off the timing of the booth countdown.
Note: when Flassh fetches photos from the camera, photos are resized to 2560px wide prior to upload to our servers. This ensures fast, consistent upload and photo processing speeds with a high enough resolution for most uses. If you need higher resolution images, they are always available on the SD card in the camera.
Make sure your camera’s date and time are correct and that the time matches the current time in your organization’s timezone. Mismatched organization timezone and camera settings can cause odd behavior as we rely on the date/time in each photo’s EXIF metadata.
If you’re using multiple booths (multiple cameras) in a single event, make sure the cameras are synced as close to the second as possible. If they’re not the same (or very close), photos will not appear in their expected sequence in the app and online galleries.
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