Instant camera ideas for baby showers and holidays

#	Product	Best for	Cost per shot	Price
1	Fujifilm instax SQUARE SQ40The square print with a wide bottom border — natural writing space for a message.	Best for a baby shower	$1.15	Check price
2	Fujifilm instax mini 13A self-timer, which is the whole point when the photographer wants to be in the photograph.	Best for a family holiday	$0.85	Check price
3	Polaroid Photo Album Large160 prints at four to a page, sleeved so nothing is glued to a photograph.	Best for keeping them	n/a	Check price
4	Canon SELPHY CP1500A real 4 x 6 photograph for about 39 cents, which is what a memory book wants.	Best for printing afterwards	$0.39	Check price

Baby showers: the message is the point

A baby shower is a small gathering with a specific tradition: guests leave advice, wishes or a note for the parents. An instant camera turns that from a card into a photograph of the person who wrote it, which is a considerably better keepsake.

So the format needs writing room, and the arithmetic is different from a wedding — groups are small and almost everybody gets their own photograph.

• •One photograph per guest, plus 20%. For 20 guests that is 24 shots — two 20-exposure packs.
• •Use SQUARE or WIDE if guests write beside the print. An instax mini leaves room for a name.
• •Set up a memory book, not a scrapbook. Pages with space for a photograph and a written note, in the order guests arrive.
• •Pre-write one page. As with a wedding guest book, guests copy the example. A blank book gets names; a filled page gets advice.
• •Photo corners, not glue. Instant prints are chemically layered, and peeling one off adhesive can delaminate the back.

The full table setup is the same as a wedding guest book — camera, spare film, pens, instruction card, sample page, and somebody checking it. How to set one up has the detail.

Christenings and naming days

Practically similar to a baby shower, with two differences worth planning for.

• •Part of it is usually indoors in a large building, which is beyond any of these cameras' flash range. A church interior is not a place an instax mini will produce a usable photograph. Save the film for outside and for the gathering afterwards.
• •There are often multiple generations present, which is the single best argument for taking photographs: grandparents and great-grandparents in the same frame as a baby is the photograph the family keeps. Use the self-timer and get everybody in.

Family holidays: the self-timer is the feature

On a family holiday the recurring frustration is that the person who brought the camera is in none of the photographs. A self-timer solves it, and most instant cameras do not have one.

That table is the main practical reason to choose the mini 13 over the mini 12 for a family, and it is worth knowing that three of the more expensive instax models do not have one.

The other holiday consideration is batteries and film availability — see instant cameras for travel for the full version, but briefly: AA batteries and instax mini film are the combination you can replace anywhere.

What to do with the prints

This is the part that decides whether the photographs still exist in ten years, and it is the part most events skip.

1. 1.Decide before the event. A labeled box, a memory book, or an album. Loose prints on a table at the end of a gathering are the ones that go missing.
2. 2.Buy the album first, matched to the print size in inches. Polaroid's large album is $22.99 for 160 full-size prints; a sleeved instax mini album is about $15.
3. 3.Use sleeves rather than glue wherever the guests are not writing on the page.
4. 4.Keep them out of sunlight. Instant film fades, and a sunny windowsill will do it within a year or two. UV-protective frames exist for anything going on a bright wall.
5. 5.Consider printing the phone photographs too. At about 39 cents for a 4 x 6, printing the twenty good phone photographs from the day costs about $8 and gives you photographs that will outlast the instant ones.