Start with how many people are in the photograph
Not how many people are at the party — how many are in the picture at once. A wall that only ever has two people in front of it can be narrower than one couples, bridal parties and grandparents all crowd into. Our standard 8ft x 8ft comfortably holds four or five adults with room at the edges. Push to eight people and you want closer to twelve feet, built as linked sections.
The mistake we see most often is ordering to the room rather than to the group. A large room does not need a large wall if the photographs are all going to be pairs.
Then check the ceiling, not the floor
Height is the constraint people forget. A standard wall stands around eight feet with the frame, and plenty of New Jersey venues — brownstone parlour floors in Hoboken, older function rooms around Morristown Green, basement event spaces almost everywhere — have ceilings low enough that eight feet crowds a light fitting or a sprinkler head.
We can drop the frame height, and it usually improves the photograph rather than hurting it: a wall that stops well below the ceiling reads as deliberate, while one brushing a pipe reads as a mistake. Measure before you order, or send us a photograph of the room and we will tell you.
Then ask how far back the camera can stand
This is the one nobody thinks about and it decides more than the other two. A twelve-foot wall in a room where the photographer can only back up six feet cannot be photographed in one frame. They will end up shooting it at an angle or cropping it, and you have paid for four feet nobody sees.
If the wall is going in a corridor, a narrow bar area or against the long side of a packed room, go narrower and denser. If it is at the end of a ballroom with thirty feet of clear floor, go wide.
A practical rule
Eight by eight handles the large majority of what we deliver in New Jersey. Go wider when the wall is a stage backdrop or the room is genuinely large — the banquet halls around Edison are the clearest case, where a standard wall can simply disappear. Go narrower when the ceiling is low, the room is tight, or the camera cannot retreat.
When you enquire, tell us the venue and the room rather than a size. We would rather propose the size than sell you the one you guessed.
Planning something in New Jersey?
Tell us the date, the venue and the room. We will come back with a straight answer.
Ask us