Purikura is a really advanced photo booth. They have them in big groups in arcades and other places where young people go. The booth is much larger than our photo booths, so you can easily fit six people in there, and squeeze maybe eight people in there. It's as well lit as a professional photographer's studio inside (and consequently pretty hot). The machine shows you a mirror image of the people inside, so you can pose and such, then it takes a picture. Repeat five times.
When all the photos have been taken, you go outside to a computer station, where you can use a program to change the color/pattern of the backgrounds, write and draw on the photos, add shapes, and execute effects. You have literally thousands of choices for what to do: the entire color palette for backgrounds a writing, dozens of background patterns and auto-shapes, dozens of pen effects, and quite a few effects, some of which are particular to certain machine. For each photo, you are allowed only like thirty seconds or something to finish altering it, then it automatically goes to the next photo. I assume this is so kids don't spend hours hogging the machines making artisan purikura.
Then a machine prints up to six rows of six tiny photo stickers on one big square, which you then take to a nearby counter with a bunch of scissors tied to it and cut off individual strips. It's kind of amazing that they can do things like that--in other countries either the scissors would get stolen or they'd be used for violence and/or vandalism. But Japan is a peaceful and trustworthy place. Anyway, in addition to getting the photo stickers, if you either enter in an email address or hold your smartphone up to a panel, the purikura will email you digital copies. The whole thing costs ¥400.
A few times last year, I took a purikura set with some of my students.
Here we see the background effects, Mickey Mouse shape, and some writing.
Shapes, and couple pen effects and colors:
As you can see, their English wasn't the best.
The lipstick effect is one that you have to go to a special machine for.
This picture is kind of amusing because we had just met some creepy guy in a convenience store ("konbini") and they thought he looked like a member of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia. Chances were pretty slim, though.
In all these photos, there are two effects that the students always choose, which are "big eye" and "white skin." I think most booths have these effects turned on automatically, or you choose them when you put your money in in the beginning, because the photos always come out like this without altering them in the personalization program. Anyway, it's especially visible in this set. In most of the photos above, the perfect white skin is of course noticeable, but you don't necessarily notice that everyone's eyes are freakishly large. In some shots, though, it's really scarily obvious. Japanese girls have wicked complexes about their skin color and the size of their eyes.
Here is a split screen option option you can choose in the booth:
Another option you have when doing all the photo nonsense is getting a close up.
I sometimes have trouble with the timing of the photos. I think the giant flashes of light go off well ahead of when the photo is actually taken, so in this case I accidentally walked out of the shot just before the right moment. So I fixed it in post.
Here you can see a little glitch in the program, where there are some third eyes going on.
I think this series was the one I sent to my sister a while back, and she was like, jeez, do Japanese girls ever get pimples? But again, this is the result of giant lights and white skin effects, so they don't look this perfect in real life.
So these are the only purikura I have so far--three trips. I don't know yet if I'll do any with this year's crop of students, but maybe.
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