At the beginning of their unveiling, I shot this photo booth for them to showcase in social media & get the word out about the new theme.

It’s always fun shooting photo booths, but another element of the process that’s ALSO fun is the process to acquire the props.  Sometimes my friends see stuff in my car and are like, “what the hell is this?  what is going on here Tim?”

You should see the storage facility with ALL my props!

The venue had this awesome back-room that was specifically for guests who want to enjoy a speak-easy type vibe.  What’s really cool about the room is that when you order a drink, the bar is stacked with shot bottles – instead of making the drink for you, the bartender serves you a platter with the ingredients in these little miniatures, and you make it yourself.

For the concept of the booth, I decided to get a few boas, tommy guns, fedors, cigarette holders, and feather bands to give them the 20′s glam look.  Put on a present for the post processing, and BAM – good as gold.

It definitely helps when these kind of theme parties are promoted – guests that arrive in style make the photobooth ‘that’ much more realistic.  The staff here also did a great job getting involved, all in all – worked out for the best.

Here are a few faves from the night!

While I’d LOVE to do a full post on all of these, I don’t think I’d really have the time/spread in days to display all this content unless I did it in a jam-packed post like this.

So here we go! (If you have any questions about any of these, feel free to holler below!

Wall St. Journal – “how we built it”

Shot an interesting event for the WSJ downtown a few weeks ago, and it was actually a pretty interesting event! The morning hosted a dialogue between 6 multi-millionare entrepreneurs on how they intially broke the barriers into getting their business of the ground & rolling.

Susan G Komen Race for the Cure

Wow. This event hit me on a personal side. While I have to admit, – I’m usually a very philanthropic person, but during this event…I was thinking of it as *exactly* that. “Another event.” However, later in the day…it really hit me – there are SO many people fighting their own personal battle with cancer, illness, or some sort of life deficit. When you think of the big picture, all our problems seem pretty small! It was a blast to hang out with these guys, not to mention go and walk the field at a major ballpark!

SOLO Sunglasses Shoot

Craig Stern is one of the owners of a new company called SOLO Sunglasses, which is geared towards helping those in need of medical services. Specifically, those affected by a corrupt or disadvantaged economy that prevents them from getting the eye-care they need to manage to see. Not only are these for a great cause, but they’re actually really cool too! They’re made out of wooden frames…really gives off that “SD” vibe if you know what I mean.

Hotel Amenities

I’ve actually done this same thing for a few hotels now, which is to provide them with imagery to use internally & assure standards are met for preparing a special room order for guests staying at the location. Basically, a guest or a friend orders up a special plate of cheese, or old vintage sodas, or cocktails, or random assortments of food/gifts that can be waiting for them to arrive.

Studio Booth Round 2!

Did another photobooth for the Ivy Hotel’s Saturday campaigns. On certain weeks, the hotel and promotion teams decide to bring special recording artists that will help make a name for “Ivy Saturdays”. The DJs produce live mixes in the club and offer free mixtapes for any guests present that night.

Intervention Photo booth

It’s back! We’ll be doing it every couple weeks or so, make sure to come by and check out SoCal’s best pool party.

Cocktails!

‘Nuff said.

Photobooth for private party.

Was a huge hit, great company, this guy did his bday right!

Old Globe Theater Open House Performances

DJ Promo Shots

PR shots for Chefs preparing food for “canning”.

Photowalk with Maria Maltseva!

Harney Sushi 10 Year Anniversary Party

If you’re ever in San Diego – this place is a must. Best sushi you’ll ever had – forget Nobu. Go Harney!

Cinco de Mayo Photobooth

Andaz hosted an awesome Cinco de Mayo party, and the crowd had a blast (and I did too). I find myself wearing the mexican wrestler masks while skyping these days.

PR Photoshoots for online marketing

Bianca Jaime of SoDiego Tours got in touch to get her branding images done for her company. Lower in the blue, Jordanne strikin’ a pose for her team’s press shots.

Art in Fashion

The San Diego Fine Art Society hosted a night of wine & appetizers while guests enjoyed viewing these works of art based off 1950′s hollywood glamour. ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS a good time at these events. Ooooh the people you meet!

Hope your Tuesday’s going great! If you have any questions at all, hit me up in the comments below!

I gathered up a few props for this first go-round of the booth, and I gotta say…wow!

The booth actually barely held together that night – it seemed as everyone wanted to try to play the game of “who can tear down the backdrop.”  Luckily I came prepared, and it lasted until night’s end.  I’m not sure if the drinks made the booth better, or just encouraged friendly war-fare with the backdrop, but I’d like to think the “former”.

In any case, we came out with some great shots from the night.  DJHere Promotions is running the events on Saturdays, and they’ve lined up some pretty impressive acts for the month to come.  To get on the guestlist, email info@djhere.com

Here are some of the favorites from the night!

It’s a good sign when a client values your work so much that they’ll wait for you as opposed to going with someone else :)

I try to bring value to my clients, not only when I’m working with them – but even at times when I’m not able to…but that’s an entirely different post (watch for that post).

In any case, the theme was built around the idea of jetsetters – the nightclub transformed to include airport settings such as hong kong, jfk airport, and it even featured part of a plane in the center of the dancefloor!

Cocktail waitresses dressed as flight attendants, the bartenders as pilots, and the bussers as air traffic controllers. There was a steady line for patrons to take part in all the photobooth fun that night – which is *also* a good sign…never want to have a dull photobooth!

If you like these, check out Fluxx’s previous themes I’ve shot in the past like the snow booth and the odyssey booth.

Enjoy!

Why?

Because I almost PASSED OUT before the night even started.  With each new theme that Fluxx introduces, they host an opening night and invite some of their VIP clientele to an earlier event dedicated to providing them with an exclusive experience.  I love this kind of approach, and I love how much variety it provides for my creative outlet.

*Note – each time I do a photo booth, I press myself to get more and more creative with the props, backgrounds, and poses to improve my work.

And while I was pretty satisfied with the outcome of this booth, I think I may have pressed myself ‘a bit much’ on this one.

To get the “snowy” background effect, I bought some fake snow from a local hobby shop. To get it to stick to the photo background, I needed to apply an adhesive spray all over a 10x10ft area…and while I had a limited amount of time to set this up, I just about fainted from all of the fumes that the can produced. I finally understood what my teachers told me about “huffing” back in 6th grade. Definitely NOT as fun as it sounded.

Sometimes, you just gotta take risks though.  Here are some of my favorites from the night.

Moët is launching a new product called “Moët on Ice,” which is champagne on ice (which is surprisingly really good!) and they have been hosting events all over the US to promote the unveiling.

I checked out some photos from previous events – they hadn’t done a photobooth at any of the other cities, but I was really confident I could produce some great content for them based off of their promotional items, so we went with it! The booth turned out to be a blast, and everyone was amped on the photos – in the words of Borat, “it was great success!”

It was tough to limit down the photos as there were a lot of good ones, but here are the pic[k]s of the party!

Why?

Well, one of the main reasons I like photobooths is because I like buying stuff. Not sure why, but I just like the feeling of getting a bunch of new stuff that’s cool to incorporate with photography. By now, our garage is getting full of photobooth props and my girlfriend is wanting to pitch our story to the TV show “Hoarders.”

I’ve got the most random stuff out in that garage – you wouldn’t believe it.

I was particularly excited about this booth though – because I got to add a bad-ass battle axe to my collection of random things. Yeah – that’s right, a BC rich battle axe guitar straight out of a big-haired 80′s rock video. (You can see the real thing in the photos below)

Back in elementary school I grew up listening to bands like whitesnake and vanhalen on my walkman. I had recorded songs off the radio (my parents would never let me buy it in the store) and always liked to pretend I was a lead singer in one of the bands. I had the jeans with the holes in the knees, cowboy boots – you could pretty much say I was the most badass kid in the 2nd grade.

Anyways, this whole idea for this photobooth put me back in touch with that feeling, and needless to say I got carried away with finding all sorts of cool stuff to bring in for this booth. I decided to keep the guitar – as maybe one of these days I’ll rock out and learn to play a few riffs of Whitesnake to make the dream come ‘that’ much more alive!

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed my little story about 80′s rock bands and my 2nd grade rebelliousness. Here are some favorite shots from the night:

Their approach behind nightlife is refreshing in the sense that the guys behind it UNDERSTAND that the industry is always looking for something new, exciting, and different – which is why I think they’ve managed to stay successful despite a hugely saturated market in the gaslamp. Every few months or so, they redesign the interior of the venue to a new theme – this time around they chose “Odyssey.”

With this theme, they’ve taken the main dancefloor and surrounded it with lights resembling a star galaxy, a space-ship styled DJ booth along with glass orbs on the sides of the stage to host dancers as if they were extra terrestrials.

They decided to bring me in to do one of my photobooths, and I suggested that we do something to pay homage to star trek’s common lens flares which represent a futuristic insinuation.

Here’s the result:

We did the first run last week, and I’m really eager for the next one as I’m looking to make the event BETTER and BETTER each week. In conjunction with the campaigns, the Hard Rock is featuring headlining DJ’s each week – it’s actually pretty impressive what they’re doing with the event. If it turns out how we plan, San Diego will be put on the map as a destination city for entertainment on a nation-wide scale! With some of the better promotion companies of the city, they’ve already brought in celebrity hosts & some celebrities have appeared at the hotel mainly because of its entertainment appeal. (That’s a GOOD sign.)

Here are some of the shots from last week’s event – if you missed it, come check it out next Sunday!