Setup:

• Set camera to small/normal
• Set camera to not power-off
• set up .gphoto2/settings with --auto-detect (This only has to be done the first time, or if different cameras are used.)

Capture an image:

gphoto2 --capture-image-and-download --filename filename.jpg

NOTE the filename! So far, I've found that the filename must be set in the command line.

Helpful info:

http://www.gphoto.org/doc/remote/

Problems to address:

• any external light source is going to screw with the images
  • you can gel the strobe/s to match the ambient light
  • you can not worry about it since these are effectively snapshots anyway
• "stand here" You'll need to give a clear indication of where the target area is.
  • make an actual booth for the subjects to crowd into like a traditional photo booth
  • make a "reverse frame" to help them align their faces in (I'll try to draw up a diagram of what I'm thinking of)
• Power -- the camera will be on the whole time. You'll have to set the camera to not shut off.
  • Have a spare battery and check the booth every half-hour, switching and recharging the camera/strobe batteries as needed
  • external power supplies? (expensive!)
• Printing -- wide open. What are your thoughts?

Image Manipulation

Getting ImageMagick? to do the image manipulation is a piece of cake. It's fun, too.

Other thoughts

I would think that that would be the best "set it and forget it" scenario.

• you'll have to let the subjects know how many shots to expect.
• Some kind of visual counter would be nice (you would have to make the/a computer monitor visible in the booth)
• How to trigger the session? "hit the space bar"? show a countdown?
• I would think hiding as much of the 'back end" as possible would be to your advantage.

• One thing that occurred to me, and is attractive to me, and fun is that you can slap a custom logo on each image, or on the image set (or both).
• You could slap your logo on it by default,
• or offer to create and slap an event logo on it.
• Choose to slap both your logo and the institution/event logo on.
• Depends on how you're approaching the whole thing and if some point you wanted to use the photo booth to promote your business or not... lots and lots of options there.

• I have a script that I wrote to "slap" my sign on photos.
• I have a script I wrote for creating "posters" with stuff on them.

• Consider indexing all of the images and storing the originals. There is a possibility that someone would like to get prints of some frames.... There would have to be some kind of rules for how long to keep them, I suppose.

Notes:

2009-10-26 Wrote two perl scripts crop.pl and montage.pl. Crop generates a square crop from the center of the image. Montage takes the cropped images and combines them into a 3x2 image.

2009-10-27 I must have been dreaming because this morning the capture script no longer takes the 6 images. It is capturing a single image and stopping failing to even download it. I suspect it is something where the camera settings changed. This thing may be really twitchy...

2009-10-28 JHH

• Possible display option: gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename /path/to/image.jpg
• This will set the image as the global desktop for Gnome. (There are different ways to achieve the same thing in other window managers.)
• You could run the photo booth script in the background somewhere and show the users a blank screen. The desktop could be changed to display the latest montage.
• You could cycle back to some default image after some time-out, or some kind of slideshow...