Hey guys! We've actually made a lot of progress on a few big projects around the house:
- Painting the porch
- Building a new privacy fence
- Installing a new piece of kitchen furniture antiquer-y that's gonna blow your minds
BUT, we're also right in the middle of wedding season which is also photo booth season and even though I've taken lots and lots of photos of these projects, I haven't had a chance to get all of the many photos edited and put into a coherent post. Soon though, SOON.
In the meantime, this past week (6/28/2017 to be exact) we celebrated the fourth anniversary of the little business that could, aka Lamphouse Photo Co.! It's nuts to think that we've spent half of our married life working on this. What started as a hair-brained idea about developing photos in a camper has now become our full-time jobs and we're so gobsmacked by that reality every.single.day.
I thought it would be fun to show some before and afters of how it all began with the "Lampy" camper and what things look like today! We took a few photos to commemorate the anniversary this week so here goes!
In October 2012, we purchased what would become our vintage camper photo booth off of Craigslist for $500.
And here's what she looked like this past weekend at an event!
Pretty cute, huh? We re-painted her metal shell that robin's egg blue color almost a year ago and I love it every time I see it.
When we got her, we started by gutting the entire inside of the camper and turning it into a shell. Here's the "studio" side of the camper before, during and today:
And here's the "darkroom" side of the camper before, during, and today!
We still call it the darkroom side even though there is clearly a digital photo booth sitting right there in plain sight. The darkroom is still totally functional and we even took it out last year and developed some photos in it just to prove we could ; )
But the truth is, when we took it out as a studio/darkroom we were working ourselves to the bone and making about $100 a month (during the summer/fall months ONLY). Hardly enough to make it worthwhile. So, last September we decided to add a digital booth to the inside and voila! booked twice in the past week alone! I know that a lot of folks might be sad that we went in a different direction than we originally intended but here's the way I look at it:
are people using it?
yes
are they enjoying the photos it takes?
yes
does it fill me with absolute joy when someone gets inside and goes "WHOA! This is beautiful!"?
yes
Bam! Success!
Hope you enjoyed our little trip down memory lane!
Up next, fence photos I think? Thanks for sticking with us and of course,
KEEP SMILING : )
Why didn't the film work out? Too expensive to operate? People didn't like waiting for their photos?
ReplyDeleteJust curious.... I'm really happy for you that you've been able to make a living at it!
Well, there were kind of a lot of reasons we stopped doing the paper negatives and switched to digital. It wasn't especially expensive to operate but it was incredibly laborious for very little return. People didn't mind waiting for the photos but we only had about 10 people get photos at our last couple of outings so...interest was...not great. In the end, people just wanted to get inside the camper and see it and use a unique photo booth so we decided to give them that and get it out to more people while making it easier on ourselves to set up and operate. And the response to it has been a lot better : )
ReplyDelete