We covered Wendy & Mark’s Photobooth in Kingston on Saturday night and recognised half of the people there! Jackie and Chris were married a few weeks ago, had just returned from their honeymoon, and turned up as guests and Katie and Simon who have booked us for next May are related to Wendy and Mark. They all love the Photobooth!

Here is an email from Wendy and Mark that arrived in my Inbox this evening, verbatim.

Hi Richard,

We are just about to embark on our honeymoon, but we had to let you know how thrilled we are and would like to say a massive thank you for your work on Saturday night at Warren House. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves and we are so pleased with our souvenir of the evening.

We definitely will be in touch again when we return to organise the thank you cards. Thanks again,

The newlyweds
Mark and Wendy Briggs xxx

Here they are.

Here’s Katie and Simon.

On Sunday we did a wedding show in conjunction with the Maidenhead Advertiser at the Manor Hotel in Datchet. The hot weather and the footy contributed to a slowish day but after making sure that all potential clients had been into the Photobooth for some free photos we invited all of the other exhibitors to use it… Here is Amy and the rest of the Maidenhead Advertiser crew. Thanks Amy!

Here is the lovely Natasha from the table decorating company, Seventh Heaven, from the stand next door to us. She was mesmerised by all of the giggling and laughing coming from the Photobooth.

Hope you didn’t mind me adding some personal stuff to the blog last week. It was a pretty traumatic time. Mum is still in hospital in SE1 and really, really bored but she is having the angiogram in the next day or two and hopefully having the pacemaker fitted by the weekend. Cross everything for her please!

but when events spill over from my personal life that directly affect the business it seems sensible to let people know what is going on. Good vibes are always good too.

My mother, Mary, was rushed into hospital last Saturday morning with an massively elevated heart rate running at around 210 bpm. For those of you who don’t know, a normal resting rate should be around 70 bpm. She’s 81 so things were very sticky for quite a few hours and we came very close to losing her.

Up until Saturday my opinion of my local hospital was poor at best but I would love to extend huge thanks to Hillingdon Hospital for the amazing care that they provided. It was 9 pm having consulted with Harefield and St Thomas heart hospitals that they were forced to stop her heart and use a defibrillator to start it again to try and bring it back into a normal rhythmn. It all worked and apart from the odd blip she seems to be ok. They transferred her to St Thomas hospital in London overnight where a superb intensive care bed was available and she has been there ever since.

The thing is the trek into London to see her every day is taking a few hours out of each of my working days and it has slowed up the amount of work that I have done this week.

If anybody is waiting for CDs from their Photobooths that we have done I can tell you it will be worth the extra wait as I have some superb new CD boxes that also contain an 8″ x 6″ collage from a bunch of the shots taken in the Photobooth. I’ll post a shot next week when I can find a little time to give you all an idea of what you can expect but they are very, very nice.

Back to Mum for a sec. She is now able to sit in a chair and they will be giving her an angiogram in the next day or two to decide whether she needs a pacemaker or not. The discomfort that she will have to put up with will be a very small price to pay as I understand it is a pretty routine procedure. She is now out of Intensive Care and in the cardiac care unit. The staff at St Thomas are superb, by the way.

I would like to extend huge thanks to Dominic and Stephen for dropping everything to cover a Photobooth for Natasha’s Batmitzvah on Saturday night so that Zoe and I could stay at the hospital. Zoe, for those of you who don’t know is the Rentabooth Queen for making up the guestbooks etc. She is also my niece and if I had told her that she had to leave her Nan in the situation that she was in, she would have probably told me that she wasn’t budging from that hospital waiting room…

If your Mum is still around you need to give her an extra big hug when you next see her. Mum’s are too precious to lose.

Here are some shots from Natasha’s Batmitzvah. Here she is.

Even the lads decided that they liked the feather boas and I love the shot of the guy with the saxophone.

An interesting and very busy weekend with the interesting twist that I woke up on Friday morning with no voice! Nothing. Not even a squeak would appear when I tried as much as a whisper. By mid morning after saltwater gargling and all that stuff the only sound that would come out was a bit like a sealion and we had three Photobooths over the weekend and a pretty big Sri Lankan wedding!

I spent the day keeping quiet, not that I had a lot of choice in the matter. Loads of fluid and various throat lozenges meant that we left for Julia & Nick’s Photobooth in Burnham on Crouch in Essex and I was just able to whisper, but that was about it.

We arrived at the venue and set the Photobooth up so we were ready to go and Zoe suggested that we had a quick drink prior to starting. I had a half of cold Fosters (I don’t usually like the stuff) and gave the voice a try out and it worked! I couldn’t believe it! I seriously did not believe that a drop of cold beer could have such a dramatic effect and we had a great time as the guests made great use of the props as they went into the Photobooth and we have some great shots to show you.

What was even more surprising was the fact that my voice actually gave up again on the way home! Not much more than a squeak again!

I spent the morning leading up to Meera & Ragu’s wedding at the bride’s house just whispering to preserve my voice and by the time it came to shoot the family groups I was able to make myself heard. It worked too and without the beer this time! I did resort to using the DJs microphone at one point though but I was having to compete with his music to shoot a mighty big group on the dance floor.

I’ll post some shots later today along with some images from Meera and Ragu’s wedding, Leanne’s birthday photobooth and Luan & Paul’s photobooth.

Here are Julia & Nick from their Photobooth on Friday night.

The girl in this shot spent ages getting the sequence right to make sure that the images fell correctly on the print so that it ready properly.

Onto Meera & Ragu’s wedding. Here she is getting ready.

Here are some shots from Luan & Paul’s Photobooth on Saturday night.

Onto Leanne’s birthday Photobooth in Mill Hill. It was a fancy dress party. No props required!

There you have it. An eventful weekend and I’m just happy that voice held up. Still a bit squeaky but it’s finally on the mend.