My brother and I were pretty imaginative kids. We were always doing creative things like building cubbies and making movies. But sometimes our creative pursuits moved into stranger territory, like the day we tried to build a photo booth. Melbourne city had just got a bunch of cool photobooths which inspired us to make one at home. I know, weird right.
As you can imagine, the venture didn’t turn out quite like we’d expected. Here’s how we tried to build it. First we tried making a frame out of kitchen chairs and then used blankets and sheets to make a darkened booth. But the blankets weren’t taut enough and would collapse on us if we tried to enter. So then we asked our dad to bring us a big box from work. This worked a little better. We inverted the box so that it was open at the bottom and placed higher up on kitchen chairs. Then we cut a door into the box and hung a black sheet over it. It was starting to look more like a photo booth. When it came to taking the photos, I had been given this cheap disposable camera for christmas and we were planning to use that, except the flash was broken so whenever we took a photo it was way too dark. We finally persuaded Mum to let us borrow her slightly more expensive camera and that worked fine. It was just like the CBD photobooths, Melbourne would never know the different… kind of.
With our makeshift photobooth complete we started playing the photobooth game. This involved one of us playing ‘the person’ and the other one playing ‘the machine’ – who would silently take the image when the person would press the photobooth button. Kids can be such weirdos sometimes.