Sebastian's Photo Booth Birthday Invites

I've been taking advantage of every chance to get a photo strip from the old-fashioned booth nearby before we move back to a boothless town. Oh, the sadness! We did a strip of just Sebastian to go along with his teacher gift in May and I really loved seeing him enjoy getting the booth all to himself so we decided to do his birthday party invitations in a similar way.

All I did was tell him to hold up eight fingers in all four pictures thinking we'd just use the best one but his faces were all so fun that I decided one wasn't enough. I scanned the strip and opened it up in Photoshop. Then I made two copies and cropped the first two photos of the strip in one and the second two photos in the second.

I then copied those two cropped photos and placed them side-by-side on a new background and flattened my image. I cropped it down to the edges and then sized it to about 3" wide so that I could fit four images on one 8.5" x 11" sheet of photo paper. I made a new background that measured about 8.5" x 11" and pasted my image four times, making sure to line them up so I could cut them quickly with my paper cutter.

I did a test print on regular paper and then printed them out onto photo paper to get the same feel as a photo strip. Then I wrote the details of the party on the back of each photo with a sharpie and tucked them into standard card envelopes leftover from another batch of store bought thank yous along with a red balloon. I had originally planned to write the details of the party on the blown up balloons but my sharpie started to smear so I ditched that plan. 

They were fun to make and so incredibly inexpensive. I wonder how expensive it would be to buy our own photo booth and keep it on our back porch? Yeah, that'd be ideal.

Since most people don't have fabulously old-fashioned photo booths in their towns, another option would be to just take photos of your child against a white wall in a naturally lit setting, editing them to be black and white with your photo editing software, and then copying them all onto one backgroundwith a little bit of white space in between them all.

Do you have a favorite photo strip from an old photo booth? Also, how many times have you watched Amelie?

-Rachel