If you’re an avid partygoer, you’ve probably been tagged in your fair share of embarrassing photos. You may have woken up on Saturday afternoon, logged onto your Facebook and gone through photo upon photo removing said tags so nobody would know how much of a hot mess you were the night before.

What if there were a way that you could take all the party photos you wanted while maintaining a more flattering appearance – if the person with the camera wasn’t only stealing your soul at your most unattractive moments? Fortunately for you, there is a solution: the do-it-yourself party photo booth.

You can get as detailed as you want with this project – whether you want to take the steps to actually construct a booth or take the easier route to make a cheap (but still fully functional) “booth” wherever you choose to get down. A photo booth feel is easy to achieve in any setting, assuming you have a backdrop and someplace to hang it from.

For a more authentic-feeling booth, use a corner of a room or a closet. For the backdrop, a simple sheet or tapestry will suffice.

All you really need to do to set up the booth is clear out the area you’d like to use for it and hang your chosen backdrop from the ceiling, or from any support that is out of view from your camera’s lens. For lighting, you can set up a desk light so that it’s pointing towards where your subjects will be standing.

With your “booth” and lighting set up, all you need now is your camera and any necessary support for it. You can set up your camera on a table or a tripod; you could even find a steady-handed friend to help out, or get your friends to take turns shooting. Relatively cheap tripods are available at Best Buy for as low as $15.99, and camera attachments are universal so whichever one you choose to buy will work for any camera.

I wanted to try this idea at a party on New Year’s a few weeks ago. I planned to find a tripod and a remote control for my camera, thinking that I could set it up, leave it on and carry the remote around with me so I could take photos from around the room. But alas, I could not afford the tripod or the remote, and I didn’t want to impose in a house other than my own by hanging my own backdrops on the walls.

The DIY photo booth is not unlike the method used by two wedding photographers, Jesse and Whitney, on their website, ourblogoflove.com. They call it their “smilebooth.” Each photo is impeccable and captures the pure excitement that radiates from each bride, groom and wedding guest who ventures into the room where the photographers have set up shop. They come prepared with a slew of props for their subjects to use in their pictures. (The photos are made even more fun by the varying levels of clear intoxication in a lot of photo subjects.)

Check out ourblogoflove.com to see even more of the indescribably creative and entertaining photography from the smilebooth and make your own at your next blowout.

Ellie Rulon-Miller can be reached at [email protected].