Like to wish you a belated Happy Christmas and hope you have a great 2011.

It’s been a while since I last had the time to add to this page and so much has happened since then I think it will be a loooong post.

First of all I think I need to thank the whole of the Rentabooth team. It has been expanding fast over the last six months and we now number five Photobooths and a dozen members of staff.

We’ve met little green men, had one of our Photobooths turned into a Las Vegas wedding chapel at a recent corporate Christmas party and also celebrated Rentabooth’s third birthday on the 22nd December. Can’t believe it’s been three years! By New Years Eve this year we will have covered 610 Photobooths!

One of the things we have been experimenting with is using different coloured backgrounds in the Photobooth. The main issue for us has always been getting peoples skin colour right in such a small space like a Photobooth and the main reason that we have not offered it as an option. Pleased to tell you that after much experimentation it is something we can do. And everybody has their natural colour…

Back in October Rentabooth was a approached by Royal Mail about Smilers stamps. They were having a shop in Selfridges from the beginning of November until Christmas and asked if we had the technology to print their Smilers on the spot. After some research and an update to the Rentabooth software we went into Selfridges on the 3rd November and offered the Wallace & Gromit Smilers on the spot to their customers.

The camera we used was hidden inside a 100 year old wooden plate camera and we were shooting adults and kids and printing their photo on a sheet of 20 First Class stamps. Here are a couple of examples.

They are loads of fun and we are hoping to offer the stamps to couples who use our Photobooth images for their wedding thank you cards later this year. Watch this space!

A while since I managed to find the time to do an update. I must find the time to report more often. I must try harder!

Three weeks ago we covered our 400th Photobooth. That is very good going as we covered our very first for Rachel & Ian in December 2007 which makes us the busiest Photobooth company in the UK by a long, long way.

Quite a few important milestones in the first two and a half years of Rentabooth. Our first canine Rentabooth subject. Our first Photobooth that featured a live chicken complete with feather boa! Our first circus based Photobooth. The list goes on…

Here are a few from Lucie’s circus themed party. The guests outfits were fab

.

Surprisingly the chicken was more of a poser than the dog. Archie the Scottie never really got into the Photobooth groove.

Quite a few weeks ago we had a call from an Israeli based charity about a summer camp in the UK for Israeli youngsters with cancer. They bring them over to the UK for a holiday to remember every two years. If you have read some of my ramblings from earlier this year, you will know that Rentabooth now chooses a single charity event every year where we donate our services and accept donations from the users of the Photobooth that go to the charity.

Last weekend was fully booked Saturday and very unusually for us we had a free Sunday. What I didn’t realise was that we would miss the World Cup Final but on Sunday it didn’t really matter as England weren’t in it any way. Ho hum.

Having taken a look at the Zichron Menachem website. (www.zichronuk.org)

I decided that we would donate our services to them too as it such a worthwhile cause and on Sunday at the Holiday Inn in Brentwood the Photobooth went down an absolute storm.

When I tell you that these 135 youngsters, 40 helpers, the medical staff, the entertainment crew etc, despite their illnesses, live life to the absolute max. It may surprise you but they queued until they had used the Photobooth and then ran back around and rejoined the end of the queue! They were brilliant and we also made over 350 keyrings to hand out and as the last keyring was put together we looked around and realised that we were left there, in the dark and everybody else had gone! That’s how busy the Photobooth was and we ran it almost no stop from 6.00 pm to 10.00 pm. I would like to thank Stephen, my long suffering mate who donated his time too. When we got back we were absolutely cream crackered. The M25 was down to one lane on the way home so we missed the pub too.

Many, many thanks to all of the staff and helpers from Zichron Menachem. They were superb and if you feel the urge to give them a donation you can do that through their website too.

St Patrick’s day is always great for a laugh and last Wednesday was no exception. I found myself in Bakers Street setting up a Photobooth and all of the hats on this were supplied. The company had boxes of them! I think most people at the party were able to take one home.

I love playing with themes and more and more clients are asking us to theme their prints. No charge for doing it and it adds yet another dimension to the prints that go to your friends and guests.

Here are a couple of the shots. First as a normal individual shot and then in the way that we print and handed out the prints to the guests.

It’s been a while since I last found the time to blog as the article about Kitty Dimbleby in the Daily Mail produced a lot of enquiries and we have covered over 30 Photobooths since then…

The week following Kitty & Ed’s wedding in Bath we covered Emma’s Birthday party on Halloween. We covered two fab parties that night and the decoration was superb. Emma’s party was fancy dress and the outfits were superb.

Stavros Flatley have appeared at two events since I last blogged doing their thing to rapturous applause in both cases. First at the Emirates Stadium on the 25th October at Sara’s Batmitzvah and then on the 8th November at Jake’s Barmitzvah at Claridges.

I was shooting the function the Batmitzvah at the Emirates rather than the Photobooth and here are a few fun shots.

Here they are again in the Photobooth a couple of weeks later at Jake’s Barmitzvah.

On the 5th November we found ourselves in Leeds at Chili White (one of its trendiest venues) covering Naomi’s 21st Birthday Party and apart from the staff there was barely a single northern accent between them. All from Harrow and Eton, apparently.

Many, many thanks to Lucy and the staff. Great fun. There was a real buzz about the place. Here they are getting into the spirit of things.

Megan’s mum made me laugh at Quaglinos that same weekend insisting that the Photobooth was mainly for the kids and not to expect many of the adults to be using it. We couldn’t keep the adults out!

Dena and Mark’s wedding reception in Hendon a couple of Sundays ago was a site to behold and the bunnies ears went down rather well…