Wedding Entertainment: Must have or a waste of money?

I looked at/ though of this too. Photo booths were super fun at the first two weddings that did them. They looked a little sad and neglected at the last 5.

I like Hanks idea of a second shooter and a background.

I'd ask a teenage cousin / friends kid to be the photographer (keep cost down, I have a decent camera, hell any I phone has a good camera, and I have an excellent halloween box for accessories, or dollarama). I would've been tickled to do that as a teenager. Get someone bubbly and engaging. The photo booth is mostly for the fun anyway. then if you're having a gift opening or whatever the next day you (they, the designated person, as you are overwhelmed with family and friends and sleep) can get a bunch instant printed in the morning and available to look at/ laugh at / groan over.

Or be smart like Carmel and send the photos with the thank you notes if your doing those.

If photo booths are out of your budget (they can cost $600+ for two or three hours), you can always buy disposable cameras and give one per table. Then you can develop the pictures that guests take and make copies as thank you cards.


Or you can get your secondary photographer to simply take pictures at a designated area with a nice background and send them digitally.
Whether you need additional entertainment will depend on your guests. Some people like dancing, some not so much. If you're planning a long night, some additional options won't hurt if it's within budget. You know your own guests more than anyone.

View quoted message Oooh that's great! Fyi I just replied and I don't see my reply so I'm trying again. Hoping it doesn't show up twice 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️ we had a NYE wedding (or planned to but it was postponed - we still pretended 😆) so balloons - my favourite - was an easy backdrop options. We bought a garland set off amazon (they were popping as we were doing it so crap quality but came with way more than we needed) and 2021 gold balloons. We also got some stick prop sets from Party Mart and Party City - one came with a gold backdrop but we didn't use it. The glue dots from the garland were too strong and we didn't want to peel the paint so we ended up just taping the decorations up and tieing one end - unfortunately we were so tired we didn't test it so it wasn't quite high enough 🤷🏻‍♀️. Oh well. Here are some pics - you can see it behind our welcome sign and then there's us not using cocktail hour for alone time but instead getting the photographers attention 😆.

My fiance and I are only having a DJ for our wedding for our entertainment. We don't really want to fork out more money for photobooths and such. It's not something we are wanting at out wedding.

If you really would like a photobooth at yours, go for it! Splurge a little it's your wedding day

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That sounds like a great idea. We also hired two photographers and they had brought up the idea of us offering a photo booth type of area during the cocktail hour etc.

Very curious about going the DIY route with a photo booth. How did you do that and what were the costs and time involved with it?

We and all of our friends and family LOVE photobooths and knew we wanted one but didn't want to pay the ridiculous price. We went the DIY route and had one of our photographers take the photos (from about 9:30pm-11pm) as we had them for 11 hours and this was post dinner time. Our guests loved it (covid wedding activity) and we sent photos with our thank you cards - as well as emailed them copies.