Con Booth Idea

The girl pictured here is not sitting in front of a bookshelf. She's sitting in front of a photographer's backdrop that looks like a bookshelf. I recall that at least a few of my school photos from grade school were similarly set up like this before the more abstract backgrounds became more en vogue. You're not limited to books or color blobs, of course; you can get all sorts of backgrounds that look like brick buildings or log cabins or serene lakes or or just about anything else you can think of.

There are more elaborate set-ups as well, where you get a more developed, three-dimensional background. There's naturally less portable, but you see them in amusement parks and the like where people put on costumes and get sepia tone pictures of themselves looking like they're in an Old West saloon or on the deck of a pirate ship or whatever.

In both cases, they're basically trying to photographically recreate a setting and ambiance for the person being photographed. Sure, you could stand in front of a green screen and have something added digitally, but most folks aren't good enough actors to make that look remotely convincing. With these types of sets, people can at least begin to get a feel for things and have some level of interaction with their environment that they don't have to completely make up.

So, here's my thought. What if a creator who mainly focused on one character or genre -- or was mainly known for one character or genre -- had a theme-appropriate backdrop to stand in front of? So instead of this...

... you get something like...

(Not a great Photoshopping job, I know. It's late. But you get the idea.)

Now, you'd want to incorporate your name or URL or something in there, obviously, but perhaps as another banner than runs across the very top or somewhere that doesn't intrude much into the background. But my thinking is that A) you've got an eye-catching and theme-appropriate backdrop that very quickly speaks to the type of work you deal with, and B) provides the potential for interactions as people could try stopping by your booth just to get a photo of themselves on board a starship, or in a castle or whatever.

Maybe it's just me, but I think it'd be kind of cool and clever to see a creator doing that at a con. We've seen some of the bigger publishers and movie studios do this type of thing three-dimensionally, but I think an independent creator could do just as well with a simple (and much cheaper!) backdrop image.

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