Retrogamecon 2025
This past weekend was a fun one. I attended Retrogamecon in Syracuse, NY. It was the first time for me, and the first conference like this I had ever attended. I wanted to start getting practice doing cosplay photography, and I definitely went to the right place. There were so many people with great cosplays.
Since this was my first time really doing cosplay photography and I'm still new to shooting with a DSLR in manual mode, I made plenty of mistakes. The biggest ones are either overexposing or underexposing a photo, and also some photos that seemed in focus, but then, when reviewing them, I noticed they were slightly unfocused. Now, some of these were that I just didn’t notice and thought everything looked right. While some of the others came down to timing.
Most of the photos were done on the main expo floor, where all the vendors were. The lighting was pretty good, but there were a lot of people walking around, and when I ask someone for a photo, I don’t want to take up too much of their time trying to get all my settings right. I mostly looked at my histogram on the camera and tried to keep that centered. For the most part, that worked great.
Focus was my other problem, and the best thing I can think of for why I messed that up was that I would look through the viewfinder, and I would look above my glasses, focused based on my bad eyesight, versus when I would push my glasses back up, so I was looking through my glasses, the focus was better.
Back to the con itself, it was so much fun seeing all the vendors and the things they were selling. My biggest problem was that I just wanted to buy everything from every vendor. I really liked the free play arcade area with all the computers and consoles. I think my favorite might have been playing Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe. I also found a Compaq Presario PC that was similar to my first computer. They also had a few computers running The Sims and The Sims 2. I might have added a pool without a ladder to the game that was running, and then left to let fate decide those sims' fate.
They had E-sports tournaments every day, run by the local E-sports arena, Elite Gaming. I would go over and watch when I needed to sit down. I attended a couple of panels, the Orange Box reunion with voice actors from Half-Life, Portal, and Team Fortress. I also went to one about ROM hacking that was interesting. I went to the cosplay contest to see even more cosplayers.
The whole thing was great, and I hope to go back next year. I'm hoping to go to other cons in the area too, so I can get more experience doing cosplay photography.
