A "Body Parts" Throwback to Photographs from the 90s

by Skip Cohen

It's my favorite day of the week, Throwback Thursday. While I've shared the challenge of posing tall grooms and short brides in the past, this morning in my hunt for old photographs, the print below came up, followed by a set of 5x5 proofs from the original shoot for the book, "Don Blair's Guide to Lighting and Posing Body Parts."

Talking about 5x5 proofs is a throwback all in itself. So, for those of you who grew up exclusively with digital, everything used to be shot on film. Once developed we'd get a set of printed proofs for the initial viewing. From those proofs, the final images, whether for a stand alone print or an album would be selected.

On stage during the WPPI program, nobody did it better than Don Blair!

Here's the backstory:

Don Blair and I wrote a book together in the 90s that covered most of the biggest challenges of portrait photography. From hand-posing to kids with braces, to subjects wearing glasses, masculine and feminine posing, etc. - It covered just about everything, including tall grooms and short brides.

We shot all the images for the book in Las Vegas with local models so that when the book launched a year later at WPPI, we could use the actual models from the book for our program. Body Parts was the opening event for the convention that year.

The two pictures at the top were examples of how people typically pose couples with a height difference - he was 6'4" and she was under 5'. Don wanted to get people to think outside the box! His favorite pose for this kind of combination was to seat them on the floor and create one of his signature bridal portraits.

During the two-hour keynote program, we went through at least a half-dozen challenges from the book. "Big Daddy" was in his glory every step of the way. The final poses scanned from the page in the actual book are to the right.

Besides the fun and importance of bringing back old photographs for a walk down Memory Lane, think about your own skill set and how you've grown as an artist over the years. Next, think about the responsibility you have to your subjects. They're trusting you to meet their expectations and deliver your very best! That's what we wanted when we put the book together: to help portrait artists deliver their very best!

If you haven't taken the time today to wander through your own files and search for throwbacks, don't miss the opportunity. I think you'll be surprised at how much you've grown. You might even find a few throwbacks to help direct you to where you'd like to go next in terms of style and technique.

Happy Throwback Thursday!

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