I guess I should have stayed in Las Vegas another week: thanks to a comment on a previous post, we’ve seen flurry of black and white photobooth pictures of NBA All-Stars in Las Vegas for the game this past weekend.

The photobooth was at the Palms Casino, for an “All Star Media Availability” event on February 16, and the photos showcase the goofy grins of Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, LeBron James, and other familiar faces. Thanks to Amy for the original comment, which led us to Kevin Garnett, and then to a few Google Alerts that led us to the other photostrips around the web. You can check out seven photostrips here and four others here (with some duplicates).

The photos, as seen on Yahoo! Sports, are credited as “by Jennifer Pottheiser,” (see more of her NBA photos here) which brings up the age-old conundrum of how to credit a photobooth photo. The subject is usually the one who initiates the photographic action by inserting money or pressing a button, but when you get down to it, a machine is taking the photo, and we can credit the subject who pressed the button, the person overseeing the booth, or the whoever grabs the photo out of the slot and scans it.

Photo: Shaquille O’Neal, by Jennifer Pottheiser/NBAE via Getty Images on Yahoo! Sport.

A few photobooth-related projects and other additions to the site: first, we’ve mentioned the Photoboof project before, but we’d like to point out Alex’s photos of the inside of a great old Canadian black and white booth, one of four that was being re-covered for a corporate event. The photos document the inside, the outside, and the mechanical innards of the booth, and are worth a look inf you’ve never seen the chemical baths and spider mechanism.

Secondly, a recent exhibition at the Stockholm Moderna Museet featured the photographs of Carl Johan De Geer, a photographer, artist, and musician who made his own homemade photobooth in the 1960s that allowed viewers to photograph themselves. The resulting photos, more than 300 of which are now in the museum’s collection, depict the artist’s family and friends, as well as artists and musicians, both known and unknown.

And finally, the most interesting photobooth project of late, the John Wilkes Photo Booth. The name says it all; check it out for yourself.

Photo: John Wilkes Photo Booth schematic, boothshotme.com.

We spent the past weekend in Las Vegas, and I hoped to find a couple of photobooths, ready for enthusiastic partygoers to document their weekends of debauchery. I should have known that in a place so heavily trafficked and constantly upgraded as Las Vegas, most of the booths would be digital. At the arcade at New York New York, the photobooth was digital, as it was at the arcade at MGM, and from examples I’ve seen on the web, the photobooths at Stratosphere and the Rainforest Cafe are both digital, as well. A photobooth in front of the Imperial Palace casino closed last year, and was probably digital anyway. So, I was pleased to find a Flickr photo of a photostrip from a real dip and dunk chemical photobooth in Las Vegas.

On Saturday afternoon, I paid a visit to this photobooth, at the Golden Palm Hotel. From the MGM Grand, where we were staying, I took off along Tropicana Boulevard toward the Golden Palm, about a mile away. I expected a brief stroll, but it was more like a hike, over two giant pedestrian bridges, through the parking lot of the Excalibur, over Interstate 15, and around the chainlink fence and into the Golden Palm’s parking lot. Crossing I‑15 from the Strip is like entering another world, and the hotel was pretty dead. It used to be the Golden Palm Casino and Hotel, but it seems to be the Golden Palm Hotel and Lounge now, with the “Casino” unceremoniously painted over on their sign. The photobooth was indeed a real Photo-Me booth, but it was in the lounge, and the lounge didn’t open for another four hours. So, I was stuck snapping a photo through a locked exterior door, and I hope an intrepid Las Vegas photobooth enthusiast will send us a scan of a photo from this booth at some point in the future. I also hope I’m not right, and that there are a few more old-style photobooths still around in Las Vegas.

Corel Software, the fine folks who brought you Word Perfect (or at least bought it and revived it) are currently promoting what they call the Corel Snapfire Plus Photo Booth Contest, in which they will be “compiling the world’s biggest photo booth photo strip” through user-submitted snapshots. I hate to be so critical when they’re obviously trying to rustle up interest in their product by tapping into whatever warm feelings people have for the photobooth, but they do such a poor job that we have to point some things out. First, of course, it’s a photobooth-style strip, but it’s sort of strange to say they’re compiling the world’s largest photostrip, when it’s really just an assemblage of digital photos that people send in. Are they really even going to print them in a long strip?

In their statement, they say, “Yes, we want those one-armed self portraits that everyone has taken of themselves at some point. ” So it’s not even really supposed to be in the style of a photobooth shot, but rather in the just-as-recognizable but much newer digital camera self-portrait style, slightly off-kilter but charming.

We want you to send us your photo, and we’ll add it to (what we hope will be) the world’s longest photo booth photo strip!

Are there other photostrips out there that are longer than the traditional strip, like, say, nine or ten inches long? Are they worried they might not make it?

Contest details: Submit your photo showing love, ready to be added to a long line of photographs (just like a good old fashioned photos booth) [sic]. It’s easy!

And the final instruction of the contest:

Visit snapfire.com on February 14th to see yourself as part of the World’s Biggest Photo Booth!

Wait a minute. Are we trying to make the world’s longest strip or the world’s biggest photobooth? Those are two really different things.

And finally,

That’s all there is to it! Keep an eye on Snapfire.com on Valentine’s Day to see you’re [sic] picture as part of the world’s biggest photo booth.

Hmm. We’ll keep our eyes peeled to see what the final photostrip — or photobooth — looks like.