This morning, the wonderful Ashley shared all the pictures from the photo booth at the dance party at this year’s Pursuit 31 Conference, and I was so, so excited to see them. Ashley had set up the lighting and the camera, a D700, like I shoot, with a 50 mm lens on it, and I was enlisted only to press the shutter. Being in the photo booth room all night meant that I got pulled into an awful lot more pictures than last year (like this one with some of my favorites, Ashley, Meagan, Hannah, Jenny, Corinna, Karen, Suzy — yes, you might recognize her because she showed up on my blog here back in February — Catie, and Emily).In addition to goofing off with some wonderful people that night, I learned a few valuable life lessons from the photo booth:

• Everyone wants to feel included and have a good time . . . even people who are shy and good at pretending they enjoy being wallflowers.
• Looking good has a lot more to do with our attitudes and expressions than the amount of makeup or type of clothes we put on.
• A lot of people — and I, in particular — are terrible at accepting compliments and thanks and very good and brushing it off and discounting our contribution/work/service as nothing special when we should simply and humbly accept heartfelt thanks.
• It is so important to not care how we look all the time, and instead care about how everyone around us feels.
• In order to be truly happy, we all definitely need to be surrounded by people who can make us laugh at ourselves.

If you’re like me and enjoy perusing random (and often hilarious) photo booth pictures, you can see more here in the PASS gallery!

~ Laura