DIY Wedding Photo Booth Prop Wall

Photo Booth Kiss

One of my favorite DIY projects from our wedding was our photo booth wall. I’d been hunting online and run across quite a few different photo booth ideas. While I loved the photo booth strip design where you walk away with several different shots, it was the mock prop walls that really made me fall in love with the idea. Especially if we could decorate that wall with framed pictures of our family.

Now, under normal circumstances, I would have taken the idea to Mr. W and asked him to build it. After all, he’s handy and stuff.

But we had just a *few* things going on before the wedding.

So I did what I used to do before Mr. W came into my life.

I called my dad.

My dad, you see, is ALSO amazingly handy. That man can build almost anything.

So I called him up and asked. And he said he thought he could figure something out.

So I snagged Hair and the two of us headed off to Ollie’s to see if we could find some big picture frames to get things started. Since Hair worked at Tuesday Morning while she was in nursing school, she reminded me that if the glass was broken, we could likely talk our way into a nice discount.

Stop right there…this does NOT mean that we smashed the glass in the frames we wanted. Sheesh.

So we started sorting through the frames looking for ones with broken glass. We found two we liked at Ollie’s and then snagged another one at the Goodwill Store. We hit up the dollar store to find some secondary frames to hold pictures and then we headed to Habitat for Humanity’s ReSale store to look for wallpaper. We found two different patterns we liked, one a very neutral brown and the other a funky victorian stripe.

Total cost: $42

We pulled out the glass and pictures from the large frames and threw them away, then started arranging the frames in a space on the floor to find a layout we liked and to take measurements. Once we had that done, we called my dad up with the info and he went to town.

Of course dad, like me, rarely does anything “just good enough.”

Photo Booth

So what showed up was a fully adjustable three panel photo wall that breaks down small enough to fit in most cars. Dad built the wall in three panels (one for each big picture frame) and build a support structure that allowed you to flip the walls upside down so you could hang that particular frame higher or lower. It also allowed you to order the panels in whatever way you wanted. (Heck, you could set up just two panels if you wanted…)

He also reinforced the frame holes so the plywood wouldn’t break when people leaned through them. (That dad, he’s always thinking!)

Back of the Photo Booth

Hair and I spent the next day wallpapering the panels and finding pictures to fit into the smaller frames, then we put the whole thing aside in the garage until the big day.

Set up took about 30-40 minutes and our friends had a blast with it. Here are a few of my favorite pictures…

Friends at the Photo Booth

Love the three dimensional aspect of the reach through! Plus it was big enough to fit several people into each shot.

Photo Booth 2

One of our good friends is 6’7″ which made for some funny shots.

Photo Booth 3

Of course being a wall, it also made it easy for people to post in front of or behind the frames.

Photo Booth 4

And don’t go fooling yourself into thinking mustaches are the only cool facial hair these days. Quite a few people decided they played better as eye brows or beards, making for some amusing multiple prop shots.

Overall, this was a great addition to our wedding. A friend volunteered to man a camera set up on a tripod in front of it and people had the freedom to come and go throughout the cocktail hour of the reception. It was a great way to get people laughing and having fun and the playful nature of it was the perfect fit for the tone of our wedding.

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8 replies
  1. Jennifer
    Jennifer says:

    Thanks Jax! (and it’s so good to see you here! Feels like old times!) Photo booths are all the rage over here for weddings. A lot of people use them to replace guest books. Just another way to have a little more light hearted fun. 🙂

    Reply
    • Jennifer
      Jennifer says:

      We made this using standard sheets of plywood. It was cut into three piece so we could fit it together, but it would be very easy to do a single piece frame. (We needed it to fit into a car for transportation, so we couldn’t just do one big sheet.)

      My suggestion is to make sure the part people stand behind is at LEAST four foot tall, if not five. I wish ours had been about a foot taller (at the bottom) so we could have zoomed out and had some better photo cropping options. I think four foot by eight foot would have been outstanding, but even four foot by six foot would work if you only want 2-3 frames.

      Reply
  2. Millie Vilaplana
    Millie Vilaplana says:

    Hi Jennifer:
    My daughter fell in love with your booth. And my husband is making this for our daughter’s wedding. We’re going to follow your dad’s method of the three panels and your suggestion of the height. Then we want to haul up in an elevator to 2nd floor of the Museum of Art in San Diego. Do you think this is feasible?
    Thanks for any other words of advice!

    Reply
    • Jennifer
      Jennifer says:

      Absolutely! That’s why we made it in three sections…so our photographer could fit it into her SUV to take it places. One suggestion I would make is to have the boards go a full full lower than ours did. It was hard to crop photos to show ONLY the wall and I wish we’d had a bit more “wall” space on the bottom of the images to make that easier. Just plan to assemble it on site and you should be fine! Good luck!

      Reply

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  1. […] with power tools, this is the photo booth for you. A Flexible Life writer Jennifer Cario had this DIY photo booth prop wall created for her wedding. Think of all the fun poses you can create reaching through, standing […]

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