Happy 25th Anniversary to "Body Parts"

by Skip Cohen

​It's a 25th-anniversary throwback to 1999 and WPPI. Don Blair and I were the opening act with a packed room. We launched his new book, Don Blair's Guide to Lighting and Posing Body Parts, at the convention, but we had started the project a year earlier. Marathon Press did an incredible job printing the book and after a successful presale, the first copies were delivered the morning after our program, right on time at Don's booth on the trade show floor.

The concept was creating a small spiral-bound guide that photographers could keep in their camera bags. It dealt with posing and lighting techniques and solutions for eyeglasses, kids with braces, tall grooms and short brides, hand posing, masculine vs. feminine posing, and the list goes on and on. It addressed at least twenty-five challenges in classic portraiture plus lighting techniques and diagrams. Click on the bride for more techniques shown in an earlier post.

But today's post is really about the fun of Throwback Thursday...finding this flyer recently brought back so many great memories. Here's one of them:

Don and I had carefully scripted the program for that night. A year earlier, we shot all the images for the book with models from Las Vegas. Tony Corbell and Terry Deglau helped us with all the shooting. So, when we launched the book at WPPI in 1999, we used all the same models from the book.

At the appropriate time in the program, Don said, " Hey Skip, let's do some hand-posing!" I sent our bride to the stage, but Don didn't follow the script and instead did the short bride and tall groom segment. She was under five feet tall, and the groom was a 6'5" boxer. I was furious—he broke the script! My microphone was hard-wired into the videographer's setup, and I know he heard me drop the F-bomb and mumble something about Don!

Thirty seconds later, I realized what had happened - Don asked for hand-posing, exactly as it was in the script, but I sent him the wrong model - she only had seven fingers, having lost three in an accident as a kid! Not the easiest for hand-posing. From that point on and right up until a week before Don passed away, he never let me forget sending him the wrong model. And every time he brought it up, we'd laugh until we cried! 

There are no words to describe the pure joy of a throwback when memories like this are brought back like it happened yesterday. There are also no words to describe how much I miss Don and Terry. There's a point in great friendships when your friends become family, and losing them leaves a bitter-sweet hole in your heart. The loss is bitter, but all the memories couldn't be sweeter.

If you have yet to search for a few throwback images today, take a few minutes now. There's a reason we all love this industry so much, and for most of us, it's in the people we've met and worked with along the way. Throwbacks are a never-ending reminder of the importance of photographs and capturing every memory you can. 

Happy Throwback Thursday!

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