The Shashin photobooth at the National Family Festival 2024

On 30 May we brought ShashinBooth to the National Family Festival 2024 — which happened to be one of Prime Minister Lawrence Wong's first public events after taking office. A family festival is a good test for a photobooth: the queue is long, the kids are restless, and "ten seconds" either means ten seconds or it means a crowd losing patience.

The booth itself is a DSLR behind a branded enclosure — a proper Canon camera and studio lighting rather than a webcam, so the photo actually looks good — paired with a DNP printer that hands you a print in a few seconds, in whatever size the event calls for. Families tapped to start, posed, and walked off with a physical photo before they'd finished laughing about it.

The part people didn't expect was the digital copy. Scan the QR on screen and your high-resolution photo is on your phone immediately — no "enter your email and wait," no paywall. You can email yourself the full-quality file too, and clients can drop in their own frames so every print comes out on-brand. There's a green screen for swapping backdrops, and an AI remix option for guests who want to do something a bit more playful with their shot.

For the organisers, the appeal is that it more or less runs itself: it needs barely any staffing, and the printer reports its own paper levels so nobody's caught out mid-event. For the families, it's just a nice thing to do together and a printed keepsake to take home. Both of those are harder to get right than they look, which is exactly why we enjoy it.