In our first six months of business, we've completed almost 50 gigs...so far, we've had many minor setbacks which were easily resolved by brainstorming and/or punching computers, but we haven't had any nuclear disasters. This past Sunday was different.

See, we keep all of our equipment in a storage facility, which provides us 24-hour access to our space...except our storage company apparently locks out EVERYONE on Easter, Christmas, and New Years...because, you know, it would be totally disrespectful to the Easter Bunny if we could access our storage space on Easter Sunday.

So, needless to say, when I got the call from fellow dude (and amazing photographer) Ryan to let me know that we were locked out of our space with just a few hours before Michele's wedding, I had a brief moment of panic. Ten minutes later, I was pulling a ladder out of my Prius and hopping the fence on a secret mission to infiltrate the "holy" storage unit, but was quickly foiled by the disabled elevator. Failure.

But then I realized - we aren't the best photo booth in San Francisco because we have $10k worth of equipment to plug in; we are the best because we are a company built by photographers whose main goal is taking beautiful photographs in a fun environment - and that doesn't get locked up in a storage unit on Easter.

So we brainstormed - how do we fix this? Well, as photographers, we still had plenty of camera/lighting gear and figured out we could put together a location portrait studio. As parents, we were able to mine the eternal mess in our living rooms to find toys that doubled perfectly as props - crazy hats, glasses, toys; we were helping to clean up AND solving problems with one shot!

So we arrived on time, and set up an open air portrait studio. We snapped a few pics of of Ryan and our lovely producer Elena while setting up to check it out, and they looked so good that we decided to shoot with natural light and didn't even bother turning on our lights until sundown!

Here's Ryan taking advantage of the open 'paparazzi style' to direct his subjects:

As you can see, it's just your typical $5k photo booth camera/lens combo...and before any camera guys get snarky, we weren't using the speedlite for lighting; we were using it to trigger the optical slave on our strobe pack because the radio transmitter was...you guessed it...in the storage unit.