For our photobooth project, Erick Rosales, Eric Yoon, and I set up our shoot in front of the newly constructed USU Building. Our goal was to show the diverse personalities and people that go to our school. The project went even better than expected. I assumed that a bunch of busy college students would be difficult to convince to help us. However, I would say that overall, we received more “yes’s” than “no’s” in the 1-2 hours we photographed for. We met up around 1pm last Wednesday and set up our booth. I brought a sign that would help attract and inform people of what we were up to. Erick had actually gotten there a little early to set up and had already taken a few photos of visiting high school students as a warm-up. It didn’t take long for the area to get busy, making it easy to find subjects. The most luck we had was if two or more people were walking by together. They would usually look at each other to try to read what the other might say, then reluctantly (but nicely) agree to be in our photos. Some groups even got excited for the project, such as one group that all wanted to pose; one person in the group even wanted us to create a “mugshot” of him before agreeing to a group photo. At the end of each shoot we would ask them if they’d like us to send them the photos, which most agreed to. They simply wrote down their names and Erick volunteered to email our photos to them. The only real setback we had was when a USU employee told us we had to take our sign down since it wasn’t in an area where students were allowed to post information, however, he couldn’t have been nicer about it. I found the project incredibly fun and it opened me up to portrait photography, which I never really thought I was very good at before. As far as our inspiration goes, we were inspired by the project’s originator, Mercedes Jelinek, but decided that her use of a backdrop was unnecessary and going without it added more depth to our images.  In addition, not using a backdrop allowed us to fit more people in our frame, which allowed us to take some interesting group photos.