For a while now I’ve had this idea to do a shoot with a girl dressed up all cute and sexy playing video games – maybe it’s because I’m a big nerd at heart or maybe it’s because I thought lots of guys would love the images. For whatever reason, I was determined to do this shoot, and then I finally found the right girl on Model Mayhem – she was cute and nerdy, so it was perfect. After some back and forth we finally settled on a date for the shoot, but we didn’t know where we were going to shoot yet. Then she had this great idea…

Here in Springfield there is this neat little arcade downtown called 1984, which is owned by a bunch of friends that had collected several vintage arcade machines over the years that decided to open up a place, charge a cover, and let people have free reign over these classic games like 1942, Pac-Man, and Spy Hunter. She suggested that we contact the owner and see if he would be willing to let us shoot there.  I figured it was a long shot, but I gave him a call and he was more than happy to let us shoot there. In fact, he was pretty cool overall after we met him the night of the shoot.

We had the place to ourselves because we shot there on one of the nights where they aren’t open, so it was perfect. The owner, Devin, went out of his way to make the shoot happen and to make it fun. He gave our model the “I’m to sexy for my bow” shirt seen in the first shot to wear for the shoot and let her keep it afterwards. He helped us turn on the machines and let us shoot whatever we want, wherever we want. He even busted out his camera and shot some behind-the-scenes footage of us doing our thing, which was cool. All of that in exchange for some prints, which I happily ordered for him and personally delivered to Devin, along with our model, Jessica (along with some business cards featuring one of the images from the shoot to hand out).

The shot above is the shot I used for the business cards.

I’ll talk briefly about my lighting setup for these shots and work my way down the post.

The first shot was actually the last one we did, and the most complicated. It was a three-light setup with a Nikon SB-800 behind the camera into my 60″ umbrella for some fill, a Nikon SB-600 camera right through a white umbrella for the main light, and a Nikon SB-600 bare to cast some light on the first on the wall (and it blew out the side of the register, which I should have caught). Pretty much all of these shots had some slower shutter speeds and higher ISOs to let some of the ambient arcade machine light bleed into the image.

The second shot was a single light into a collapsed silver umbrella on camera left – I love the reflection it created, but at the same time I wish I would have had a polarizing filter to kill the reflection and see more of the pinball machine.  The third shot is the exact same setup, just a different pose/composition combination.

These next two shots were a two-light cross light setup, with the SB-800 clamped to one of the machines through a Lumiquest SBIII camera right and an SB-600 with a Honl grid back camera left from some rim/seperation.

The last shot I’m going to talk about was actually the first one we did. I stuck her into this old Star Wars arcade machine and added some fill from the top via a clamped SB-600 into a silver umbrella and then I stuck the SB-800 through the Lumiquest SBIII for the key light:

The idea was to look like she was being lit from the machine itself – I think it works pretty well.

I think this shoot turned out really well and I’d like to do a follow-up session with her that’s more home and console oriented.  I’ve got some cool ideas for that shoot as well.

I hope you guys enjoyed this one as much as I did shooting it!