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Create a Photo Booth with Your Canon DSLR

Create a Photo Booth with Your Canon DSLR

I attended a wedding a few months back where the bride and groom had rented a photo booth. With a combination of props and wine, there were many great photo strips being printed and passed around and it quickly turned into quite the contest. Naturally, I won. It seemed like a great idea – the guests were really enjoying themselves and the bride and groom kept a copy of each strip to put into a photo album documenting their big day.

After the wedding, I was talking with some friends who had done something similar and mentioned the cost involved with renting a photo booth. It seemed ridiculously high! After all, it's just a simple camera taking a few photos and printing them out on a photo printer! This got me thinking though… “I have a camera, I have a printer, and I have Visual Studio… I should have a photo booth at my house!”

And so an idea was born.

Wanting to do as little work as possible, I started my quest for a photo booth on Google. After a few quick searches, I was very pleased to find that Canon, the maker of two of my camera’s, offered SDK’s for development for both their point-and-shoots and their DSLR’s.  Thinking I could multi-task and expand this into a custom time-lapse photography application (which will surely offer me hours of entertainment at a later time), I decided to run with the DSLR option. After a quick email to Canon requesting their Canon Digital Camera SDK, I was in business.

While the SDK provides all the DLL’s you will need to develop Windows based applications, it is, unfortunately, primarily written in C. They are kind enough to provide a simple class in C# that, while really just a starting point, will allow you to get started. Not wanting to develop my own  wrapper, I again took to Google to see if anyone else would be kind enough to share their work. Luckily, I found two great resources, a blog post and wrapper by Wayne Hartman, and a code project by Christian Graus and Benjamin Liedbad. While both were fantastic resources, Hartman’s wrapper and sample project has very nearly done all of the work already.

After getting the demo application up and running, it was a simple matter of creating a new form to function as a UI, adding a few timers and events to take a few pictures, and then resizing the photos and assembling a photo strip. And done! A home made booth for my next Holiday party!

Recently, we had a DMC Oktoberfest event here at our office. It seemed like a good place to set up a photo booth, so it made its first appearance. Enjoy some of the results!

   

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Comments

Branded Photo Booth
I love the effect and props that you use on these photo booth and I also like those wacky faces.
jackie S
hello
I am a beginner and I enjoyed the article. I would love to learn how to program my own photo booth one day.

I have a Mac and each one of them have the photobooth program and everyone in my house loves it. However, I want to take it to the next level.

I have been using Breeze System for a while (the trial which never expired). Now, that I stumbled on dslrbooth last week, it seems very smooth and easy to use. I really like it. I can't wait until they drop the Mac Version for under $40 bucks. Breeze system is complex and good but the price is challenging.
leo villaflor
# leo villaflor
Canon already has a software that can be used to remotely control your camera through your computer and when it comes to picture layout you can use ms publisher or other simple related softwares.

Michael Sleman
Fernando,
Check out the dslrbooth.com software, will work perfect for you.
Fernando
# Fernando
Hi Jason,

I am creating a photobooth business in Venezuela. I already buy a Nikon d3100, Kodak printer and a touch screen LCD. But didn´t investigate well, and didn´t know that i need to have a software to run the equipments, take the photo with the customize templates and print the photos. Can you advice me and help with that problem.

Thank You very much

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