Ammena Dance Company’s “An Explosion of World Dance and Music” 2012 will be taking place on Saturday March 3rd at the Yates Memorial Centre in Lethbridge. This year’s show is just as diverse as the last, featuring bellydance, samba, Bollywood, burlesque, and an awesome tango piece. For once I am doing a proper bellydance as my solo this year… but that’s just too boring, so I picked some Lady Gaga to do it to!

Tickets will be on sale soon and they always sell out before the night of the show, so make sure you pick yours up early!

Since the tango piece is our big number this year, we went with that as the theme for the poster. Lise-Anne was a fabulous model as always, and like last year, couldn’t blink the whole time because of the extravagant eyelashes Jen gave her :)

Model, Wardrobe: Ammena Talhami
Makeup Artist and Hair: Jennifer Murray
Concept: Tanya Plonka

Please note: As usual, due to my heavy involvement in this show, I will be taking very limited sessions between now and mid-March. If you would like to book a session in that time, please contact me at info@tanyaplonka.com for availability, or I can schedule you in for April and beyond. I am still able to meet up for any wedding consults during this time, so don’t hesitate to ask if you would like to find out more about wedding collections for 2012!

They even wrapped it nice :)

Earlier this month I was contacted by a medical company based out of Maryland to take some photographs for a feature they were doing in their annual report on one of their patient success stories. When I arrived for the session the next day, I was instantly aware that Cassidy and her mom Sonya were such genuinely nice, generous people. They were surprised to have received the phone call from the company for this story, so we joked that maybe it was all an elaborate April Fool’s joke ;)

I loved capturing the special relationship between Cassidy and her mom. There was so much love and connection between them. They are both amazing people and it was a pleasure to work with them. My contacts in the medical company were also a delight to work with and were so pleasant I even looked forward to their emails!

More photos of Cassidy and Sonya after the jump:

I’m so excited to finally post about this! A few months ago the City of Lethbridge contacted me to work together over the next year building an image collection they could have for both internal use and for their brand new website. Their website finally launched this week, and it was awesome to see my photos on the front page! I have a number of images throughout the site, but since this went live only a quarter of the way into the project, there will be many more to come. If I ever have a moment, I’ll try to post a few of my favorite shots from the project as they come up.

I’ll be working with them until autumn, so keep an eye out for more photos!

By Thursday, I was definitely ready to go home even though I was enjoying myself so much (my own bed sounded way too good). However, I was ready to put in the final push to get through the last classes and learned all kinds of wonderful nerdy things about fonts and design.

Morten’s session, “How to Make Awesomesauce,” was definitely one of the most entertaining. He warned the coders that they need to start developing their modules in a consistent way that is easier for themers to use and modify, or else we were going to hunt them down.

He had many great analogies…

He also used my favorite Japanese cat, Maru, as an analogy for trying to fit content and requirements into places that don’t always accommodate it:

And then he Rick Rolled us. Geez.

After the last classes of the conference, we gathered for the closing session.

The wireless had been ridiculously slow all week. That’s not very surprising when they revealed that the 3000ish attendees had accessed the internet with over 4600 devices. How many do we really need? (Answer: All of them.)

There are also a growing number of women attending DrupalCon, though I must admit, I often felt a little out of place there being female! One advantage was that there was never a line for the washroom, while the men formed a long line for theirs :)

In the evening, we took one last walk to get some of that amazing Chicago pizza and made stops at The Lego and Disney stores for some souvenirs for Trevor’s kids.

Yes, I’m missing Disneyland. Yes, I was just there less than 3 months ago. Geez.

We flew back to Calgary on Friday, but luckily we had an afternoon flight so I was finally able to explore the lakefront in the daytime.

This was the only snow I could find:

About time I did a self-portrait!

This is the definition of terrifying, and I’m not even normally scared of birds:

A closer look:

Our hotel was next to the NBC office. I almost forget to get a good photo of the logo!

Wednesday at DrupalCon was another full day of learning, and I attended extremely diverse classes from styling maps to talking about internet marketing. I had a few “ah ha!” moments, which are always a treat at these events.

Okay, that’s it for the actual DrupalCon photos in this post; the highlight of Wednesday was the Lullabot party in the evening! Trevor and I headed to the Underground, along with our new friend from Puerto Rico, Yazan. The night started with a “Geek to Chic” fashion show, where many of the “Drupal rockstars” donned top of the line nerd attire and strutted in front of us as we cheered on. I was almost in pain by the end from laughing so much!

Yaz and me

Me and Trevor

This was intense!

Luckily it was videotaped, and I happen to be opposite the action taking photos :)

Having webchick in crazy tall heels was probably the funniest part :)

We finally ran into Gord and Anne from NorthStudio (based in Victoria). I hadn’t seen them since DrupalCamp Alberta a few months ago, so it was great to be reunited and enjoy the dance party together!

The party finished off with Jeff Robbin’s (Lullabot) band Orbit, who were insanely good. Listen!

When I had had enough of the loud music, I followed Jacob and a few others to the karaoke party at Murasake, and was amazed by how many Druplers know how to belt out a tune.

These guys, whose names I never caught, did a number of classic karaoke duets including, “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling” and “Don’t Stop Believing.”

It was here I met Jeff, and although he lives in Vancouver now, he used to live in Calgary and even spent time working in Brocket when he was younger. What a small world! It’s like us Canadians have homing devices built in.

Last week I had the priviledge of attending DrupalCon Chicago, a nearly week long conference dedicated to my favorite CMS, Drupal (it’s what I use the most to build websites, and since I’ve only been using it for a little over two years I still have a ton to learn). I went with U of L web guys Trevor and Wesley. I have a lot of photos I want to post, so I’ll be breaking this into three blogs over the next few days.

We left on Sunday for our flight out of Calgary, and had a smooth trip other than Trevor forgetting his passport on the way there (luckily we had left enough time that we could afford to go back for it!).

O’Hare International Airport in Chicago had some crazy lights going on and I was already in love with the architecture, which would carry on to the downtown district.

Our view driving in was fantastic, with the skyscrapers growing larger and larger as we neared our hotel. When you live in flat Lethbridge and mostly vacation in sprawling Los Angeles, skyscrapers are such a novel thing!

Our hotel was situated right along the river coming from Lake Michigan, and I could see a hint of the lake from my room’s window.

The day before the conference, we had each signed up for a pre-con training class, and I chose Upgrading Drupal 6 to 7, a hands-on class where we upgraded a variety of websites to the newest version of Drupal. The session was taught by Acquia members Jacob Singh, Joshua Brauer, and Erik Webb, as well as additional help from Heather James, and they were fantastic to learn from.

After a full day of learning, I headed back to the hotel to check out the opening reception. DrupalCon was now officially underway!

While Trevor went to a Bulls game, Wesley and I wandered downtown in search of food. Our walk took an hour longer than it normally should because I couldn’t stop taking photos. So beautiful! It was terribly cold, though much better than the -20C we had left behind at home, so I couldn’t complain too much.

On Tuesday morning we woke up bright (or rather foggy) and early for the opening keynote by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert and several other important figures in the community.

The man himself, Dries

An excellent Drupal suit

This was my first DrupalCon, so I was excited when Jacob Singh asked me to help out for one small portion of his presentation of the Media module. I wandered through the classroom before he began, taking paparazzi photos of the audience for Jacob to later use in his demo of uploading a gallery. Not only was it a great way to meet people (I met someone who used to go to school and be close friends with one of my art professors), but I got a shout-out during the session (at 6:36 in the following video).

Lily, who had been in the Upgrading class with me

I absolutely love this:

I saw an awesome presentation on mobile design by Fisher, who lives really close to us and who I already saw speak at DrupalCamp in Calgary. He was an amazing speaker and got away with taking a great little jab the Americans: “In Canada, we use Celsius… like most of the rest of the world. But I can also tell temperature in Fahrenheit, because we used to use that instead too. In other words, it IS possible to make the conversion…” :)

Rather than go to the Field Museum party (which we probably should have gone to, because the venue looked insane!), Wes, Trevor, and I took a walk to the Navy Pier and went for dinner. I loved it there, though it was a little too touristy after the Santa Monica Pier which I am much more used to.

We ate an amazing dinner at RIVA. I don’t like seafood, so I had the lemon chicken…

…and washed it down with a white chocolate Crème brûlée. Delicious!