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

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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.

Once again it’s been a while as always we have been very busy. Over 30 Photobooths since I last blogged!

Lots of new goodies to tell you about. The first one is the way that can now theme the prints that we hand out to your guests.

The theme on Rachel’s Batmitzvah was Strictly Come Dancing. It did help that Rachel Stevens was there doing her dance with her partner too of course.

This one was styled on the MTV Sweet 16 parties – for a 12 year old.

And this was Daniels Barmitzvah that took place at the Natural History Museum a couple of weeks ago.

This was a theme for a corporate client just before Christmas and the Photobooth had a sponsor. Of course we found space on the prints for the names!

If you would like your Photobooth to have a theme, please let us know. We have a few in the pipeline including Friends, the TV series. There is currently no charge for a theme but we do need a little time to do this kind of thing. Just yet another reason why you should book Rentbooth over any other Photobooth company!

Yep. A relatively quiet weekend has been followed by our busiest month ever with Christmas almost upon us. We have travelled from the South Coast all the way up to the North West over the last couple of weeks and our new set up in the Manchester area will be up and running in the new year. By New Years Eve we will have covered 27 bookings in December alone! Half of them corporate parties and the other half, weddings.

We have worked for the Nationwide, Wella, Chiltern Railways, the NHS and quite a few other along the way and we have another busy weekend coming up starting today.

We have some very tasty new products for the new year in the shape of some gorgeous mini albums that we make up on the spot and also Flipbooks…

Take a look at the Rentabooth website early in January to see the new goodies.

I probably won’t have time to blog between now and Christmas itself so have a fab time. don’t eat too much and hope to see you in 2010.

Here are some shots from the Photobooths from last weekend…

Rentabooth was approached a while back to see if we cover charity functions but we do get quite a few calls from charities to offer our services for free. We finally made the decision to offer our services to a charity of our choice every year that we felt was a particularly good cause.

The Tabernacle in Notting Hill last Thursday was the party that we chose after Harriet rang us a few weeks ago and all of the proceeds were going to Refuge. The party itself was free to enter if the guests at the door had a toy with them. If not the entrance fee was £25.00. The toys are to be distributed amongst the children whose mums are being looked after by Refuge to make sure that they have a good Christmas. There were over 400 people there! It was heaving.

A room was set aside for the toys to be placed in and by 9.00 pm the collection would not have disgraced Hamleys. A band upstairs provided the main entertainment but the bar was downstairs along with food and of course, the Photobooth! As popular as ever we were not charging for it but we were there with a bucket asking for cash from anybody who used it and rattled it furiously after each group had used the booth…

We raised over £440 in cash for Refuge. Here are some of the images from the evening.

On Saturday we covered a Bnei Mitzvah in Bushey for Annie & Georgia. (do you remember my explanation of a Bnei Mitzvah from a few months ago when we covered the triplets?)

Here are a few of the images.

On Sunday we were at the Hilton in Stansted Airport for a wedding exhibition. Not the busiest exhibition that we have covered as the weather was truly terrible but a few bookings directly from it already with, hopefully, more to come.

We are booking up very fast for next year and 2011 bookings have started to come in too. We already have three dates in 2010 that are fully booked.

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…

Long time no write. Apologies as it’s been such a busy time.

Last Saturday we had the privilege of supplying a Photobooth for Kitty Dimbleby and Ed Hodges wedding day. Kitty, an author and journalist, is the daughter of Bel Mooney, the Daily Mail columnist. They have been writing a weekly column together about the lead up to the wedding for the last couple of months in the Femail section of the Daily Mail. My sister mentioned it a while back and I’ve been following it week by week. It was a nice surprise when they booked us for their Photobooth and Stephen and Lisa drove down to the Assembly Rooms in Bath last Saturday for the Photobooth.

Here are Kitty and Ed in the strip on the left and another couple from the wedding on the right.

And Mum, Bel with her husband, Robin.

You may recognise the guy in the middle. Kitty’s dad. Jonathan Dimbleby.

One of things that I should have pointed out is that Kitty actually wanted and chose the old style black & white strip prints. One of the reasons that she booked us. Not something that many other Photobooth companies offer and I definitely should have mentioned it. I have edited the images of Kitty and Ed at the beginning of this post to show you what they received.

For the full article, pick up a copy of today’s (22nd Oct) Daily Mail. It’s a nice uplifting story.

Here’s a link to the Daily Mail Online for the story.

We have covered 35 Photobooths, shot three weddings and I’ve had two bouts of flu since I last blogged here about the booths. We have been very, very busy and now the Christmas bookings are getting under way…

Lots to tell you about including some new goodies, another Photobooth and new staff.

We have a new range of Photobooth albums to show you in the next week or two. The prototypes are finished but a few tweaks are needed before I pop them on a page on the Rentabooth website.

As there are so many booths to blog about I have picked out some of my favourite shots over the last six weeks.

We covered Gemma’s 30th Party on the 15th August and it was fancy dress. No props required!

Dana & Rob were married at a venue near Stevenage back on the 28th August. Her friend Tasha went to the wedding without a date and it obviously bothered her. So she made her own!

The Photobooth seems to go right across the generations and I always love to see shots where nans and grandads have used the Photobooth with the youngsters. The kids don’t seem to think it’s cool to have shots together with their older relatives until you throw a Photobooth into the mix…

The second fancy dress party that we covered was at the Guards Polo Club in Windsor Great Park back on the 23rd August.

Jo and Deb had their civil partnership back on the 9th August at Priston Mill in Bath. A beautiful venue in stunning countryside.

Jo and Deb’s invitations, menus etc had sunflowers all over them and I have a feeling that they like them rather a lot. For a short while real sunflowers featured as one of the subjects in the Photobooth.

Followed by a cleaver…

Here is what Jo & Deb had to say about us…

We wanted to write and send you our warmest thank yous to Rentabooth for helping to make our wedding day such a fantastic day.
 
Everybody thoroughly enjoyed the photo sessions and I can’t believe we were in two minds about whether to have the props or not – we should have known they were all a bunch of extroverts.
 
All our guests considered it to be a real treat and besides the great fun that everyone had, the service you provided was very efficient and first class .
 
We are also grateful for the wonderful album and messages provided as part of the fee as the quality of the photos and the album provides excellent value. It will be an album that we will treasure for a longtime.

More to come…

Kealey & Ben came back from their honeymoon last week and their images are up on the website so it’s time to show you a few.

Here’s Maci. Their daughter. We took loads of her…

The moment that they exchanged rings.

I love windy veil shots!

And the fisheye came out for a shot of the two of them with the whole reception in the background.

The reception was in a huge marquee and the light was beautiful.

And cavorting in the wheat field just as the sun was setting.

This is one of my faves of the year. We rarely see great sunsets with the other necessary ingredients here in the UK.

More to come…

It’s always good to receive thank you letters from happy clients and these two are no exception. Here’s the first:

Just wanted to say thank you for doing the photobooth on the 11th – it was a huge success and we can’t stop looking at our guest book!!!
 
Please can we go ahead and order 100 thank you postcards with the following images and message. Thank you! Love Luke and Nat xxx

Here they are:

And the second:
 
Firstly, thanks a million for making our day one to remember – people were so excited when they heard that we had a photobooth set up (we’d kept it a surprise from literally everyone) and I think they used it to the max! We love the photos and are planning on making an entire wall of them by getting them individually framed.   Natalie

Here they are:

Last weekend we traveled to Coventry, Kent and Essex and there was one particular Photobooth that I went to a little early.

The Wildlife Heritage Foundation near Ashford in Kent is a pretty unusual venue for a wedding reception as it’s a park for big cats. Callum & Claire’s wedding reception itself took place in a big marquee in the middle of the park and the wedding guests were given a guided tour of the animals as part of the day. The weather was not good and the light levels were very low for photography when we arrived but one of the guides gave Lisa and myself a tour of the big cats before we set up the Photobooth. One of the tigers…

And the bride and groom, Callum & Claire…

Their guests were a creative bunch and I’ve posted a few of the sequences of them from the Photobooth. Loads of fun!

Just after the bouquet toss…

This fun couple asked if we could increase the delay between each shot in the Photobooth sequence. No problem as long as we don’t have a big queue. I thought that this sequence was great fun.

Amy and Lee’s wedding reception took place on a farm near Coventry and the wet weather added to the drama along with problems with the main electricity generator. Teri’s car got stuck in the mud and the power went off a few times. If you are having your wedding reception in a marquee and there is no normal mains power, let us know! There are a couple of things that we can take with us to an event to prevent any power outage.

Here are Amy and Lee.

Claire & Nick’s wedding reception took place at the Woodlands Park Hotel near Cobham and they all got into the true Photobooth spirit very quickly. Here they are:

And last, but by no means least, the photographers.

Abdul and Abida had their wedding reception in North Weald in Essex on Sunday afternoon. Although they never had the opportunity to use the Photobooth themselves, their guests had great fun!

Amongst others here are the bridesmaids.

More to come soon…