Pika Pika!!! Purikura 101
One of the things we wanted to do while visiting America was to go to Japantown in San Francisco. My sister, Misha, and her husband live in San Francisco and we really wanted to spend some time with them as well as check out the city. One of my dreams is to go to Japan and since we aren't rolling in bags of cash, Japantown is a good substitute. We had read online about these Japanese photo booths that are really sticker machines called "Purikura".
So, we did our research and found a studio in Jtown that specializes in these booths. These booths are extremely popular in Japan and have made their way to the US. The studio we found is called PikaPika and they had so many sticker/photo booths to choose from. Interestingly, the machines only took yen so one must change his dollars at the cash register for yen. Each booth had a theme or specialty and many were very complicated. Basically you enter and there is a green screen with molded benches also in green for you to sit on, crouch behind, stand on etc...depending on what the picture called for. Using a very complicated interface, you choose your backgrounds and then quickly get into position. Maybe in the background one of your party is in the toilet and the rest gathered around laughing, so the one that should be in the toilet is actually crouched behind the bench so that in the final picture the toilet will be superimposed over the bench. It all happened so fast that our first set of pictures weren't that great. After the pictures are taken you go over to the side of the booth where they have an editing station. Here you can add decorations, text and morphing templates and stencils to your pics. This also was slightly confusing as all of the instructions were in Japanese save for a few labels printed in English taped on to the machine itself. When you are satisfied with your pictures then you may print them. This was very expensive as compared to conventional photo booths, but our first ones turned out so poorly that we decided to try again as we had more "Purikura" experience under our belt. The results you can see above. It was pretty fun and I would definitely do it again!!!
1 comment:
As I told you when we first saw them, these photos are such fun - love them!
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