Start with the room, not the package
Most of our cities have a dominant event type. Vaughan is banquet-hall weddings; downtown Toronto is corporate. Richmond Hill is genuinely mixed, and in a single month we will run a Persian wedding, a bar mitzvah, a corporate appreciation night, a sixtieth birthday and a school fundraiser. Those want different things.
Since the open-air booth, the glam booth and the 360 platform all cost the same with us, there is no budget reason to pick one over another. So pick on the room. Here is how we would choose.
If you have a big banquet hall and a big head count
Take the open-air booth. About a dozen people fit in one frame, entire tables come up together, and the visible queue does the work of pulling the next group in. This is the default for a Richmond Hill wedding of two hundred or more, and it is the format that produces the most prints per hour.
If the reception is in a golf club or a designed room
Consider glam. Richmond Hill has a strong golf-club and country-club reception market, and those dining rooms tend to be smaller, warmer and already styled. A bright colour backdrop fights that. Black and white does not clash with anything, and the high-key portrait look suits a room that is already elegant.
If it is a bar or bat mitzvah, or a school event
Open-air, full prop bar, and plan for the props to take a beating. The other thing that matters here is the programme: these events run in blocks, and the booth goes quiet during each one. Spreading three hours across a longer window beats two hours that collide with the speeches.
If it is a corporate night or a launch
The 360 platform holds attention across a long trickle of arrivals in a way a still booth does not. Branding, green screen and template detail are on the corporate page.
If the ceiling is low
The 360 is out, and we will say so before you pay a deposit rather than after. The arm needs about ten feet of clearance and nothing hanging in the swing path. Open-air and glam have no such requirement.
Venues around Richmond Hill
The town's event spaces split cleanly into three groups, and the group tells you more about your booth choice than the individual name does.
Dedicated banquet halls such as Elegance Banquet Hall handle the large-format weddings and the multicultural celebrations that Richmond Hill does a lot of. Ground-level access, big rooms, open-air booth territory.
Golf and country clubs, including Richmond Hill Country Club and the courses out toward Oak Ridges, run smaller and more seasonal. Mid-April through mid-November for most of them, dining-room scale rather than ballroom scale, and a strong case for the glam setup.
Hotels and civic venues such as the Sheraton Parkway Toronto North and the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts take the corporate and conference work. These behave more like downtown venues than like a Vaughan hall, so tell us the building early and we will sort access ahead of the day.
We should be straight with you: of the venues named above, the ones we can claim first-hand knowledge of are fewer than the list suggests. Send us your venue name and we will tell you plainly whether we know the room or will be arriving early to learn it. We would rather do that than pretend.
Getting there
We are in Concord, roughly twenty-five minutes from most of Richmond Hill, and there are no travel fees. We arrive about an hour before your booked start, tape cables flat and run test strips before the first guest walks in. Oak Ridges, Langstaff and the Yonge corridor are all the same drive and the same price.
What it costs
From $550 for two hours, $750 for three, $1,000 for four, staffed throughout, with unlimited sessions and two prints per round. Glam and 360 are the same price as open-air. Unlimited prints and additional waiting time are add-ons and the numbers are on the pricing page. A $100 deposit holds the date.
Neighbouring towns to the north and west are covered on the York Region page, and Markham is here.