How I ran a headshot booth at Slush: 300 portraits, two days, one camera

I ran a headshot booth at Slush for two days with one camera, one laptop, and no assistant. Guests sat down, I took three or four frames, and they walked away with an edited portrait already on their phone. Three hundred portraits over two days, and I did not spend a single evening editing or emailing.

This is exactly how it was set up. Copy it if it's useful.

The short version

• Throughput: ~300 portraits in two days, averaging one guest every three minutes
• Crew: one person — me
• Kit: one camera, one 85 mm lens, two strobes, one laptop, one iPad showing the QR code
• Delivery: guest scans a QR code, gets the edited JPEG, done
• Time spent editing after the event: none

The thing that makes this work is not the camera. It's that editing and delivery happen during the three minutes the guest is in the chair, not after the event.

Gear

Nothing exotic. The constraint at a conference booth is space and setup time, not image quality.

• Camera: full-frame body with a reliable USB-C tether port. Tethering is the whole workflow, so a loose port is the single biggest risk.
• Lens: 85 mm f/1.8. Long enough to be flattering, short enough that the booth footprint stays under three metres deep.
• Light: two strobes — one large softbox as key at 45°, one strip as rim. Set to manual and never touched again after the first test frame.
• Background: a collapsible grey. Conference lighting is unpredictable; a controlled background means every frame edits identically.
• Laptop: on a small table behind me, screen turned away from the guest.
• A second screen for the QR. An iPad on a stand at the exit side of the booth. This matters more than it sounds — see below.
• A 3 m tether cable and gaffer tape. Tape the cable to the floor. Someone will walk into it.

Camera and tether settings

Everything is manual. Auto anything will drift across 300 frames and cost you consistency, which is what lets one preset work for the whole event.

• Manual mode, 1/160 s, f/4, ISO 100
• Manual white balance from a grey card, set once at the start of each day
• Single-point AF on the near eye
• JPEG + RAW to the card as backup, tethered transfer to the laptop

The tether target is a plain folder on the desktop. That folder is the input to everything downstream.

The export preset — this is the actual trick

The workflow lives or dies on a single decision: the edit has to be a preset, not a session.

I built one develop preset before the event — skin tone, contrast curve, a small amount of clarity, and a crop to 4:5. Then I built an export preset pointing at a second folder, which I'll call booth-out:

• Format JPEG, quality 80
• Long edge 2048 px — plenty for a phone screen and LinkedIn, small enough to upload in a second
• sRGB
• Export to booth-out

So the loop per guest is:

1. Shoot three or four frames tethered
2. They land in the tether folder and appear in the catalogue automatically
3. Pick the one frame
4. Apply the preset, hit export

That's two clicks and about fifteen seconds. Everything after the export happens without me.

Delivery

Fotoflo watches booth-out. The moment the export lands, it uploads and points the booth's QR code at the new photo. The iPad at the exit shows that QR code permanently — the code itself never changes, but what it resolves to updates with each export.

The guest stands up, scans the code on the way out, and the photo is on their phone. No app, no email address typed on a laptop, no "we'll send it next week."

I also turned on contact capture with an optional email field and a consent checkbox, because the event organiser wanted the list. About two thirds of guests filled it in. That was, commercially, the most valuable part of the whole booth for the client — worth knowing when you price this kind of work.

Booth layout

Physical layout is half the throughput. Mine was a loop, not a queue facing a wall:

• Guests entered from the left, sat, shot, and exited right past the iPad
• The laptop sat behind me so nobody watched me culling
• A small sign at the chair said "look at the lens, chin slightly forward" — it saved me repeating it 300 times

The exit-side QR is the part I'd emphasise. When the QR was next to me, people stopped to chat while scanning and the queue backed up. Moving it two metres toward the exit fixed the throughput problem completely.

What went wrong

Three things, all worth planning for.

The venue Wi-Fi was bad. Predictably. This is why local caching matters — exports queued locally and uploaded when the connection came back, and the QR code kept working off the local copy. If your delivery tool needs a solid connection to function, a conference floor will find that out for you.

A guest scanned before the upload finished. Regularly, in fact — people are fast. The delivery page needs to handle this by saying "your photo is on its way" and then updating, rather than 404ing. If you're building this yourself with a plain file host, this is the case you'll forget.

I ran out of preset headroom on day two. The afternoon light through the venue's glass roof shifted and my single preset stopped working on the last thirty guests. I should have built a second preset for the warmer condition and switched deliberately, rather than nudging individual frames and losing my rhythm. Build two presets. Switch consciously.

What I'd do differently

• Two presets, not one, split by time of day
• A written one-line script for the chair. I improvised and got slower as I got tired.
• A printed QR as backup for the iPad. Screens sleep, and mine did.

Is this worth it?

The maths that matters: 300 portraits delivered by hand, at even two minutes each for export, rename, upload, and email, is ten hours of unpaid work after a two-day event. That is the actual cost of "I'll send them over next week" — and it's the reason I stopped doing it.

The booth version isn't just faster. It's a different product. The guest gets the photo while they still remember sitting down, which is when they're most likely to post it, and the organiser gets a contact list on the day rather than a fortnight later.

That's the whole pitch, and it's why I built Fotoflo in the first place.