Lethbridge Portrait & Wedding Photography & Design by Tanya Plonka

Hoo boy, it seems a little strange posting photos of Kelsie in total white out when it’s finally warm outside, but sometimes I get a little behind in my personal work! I think the problem is that I hate winter. I hate winter a lot. During winter, I tried to be in denial that it was happening. Every time I’d open Lightroom and see these photos of Kelsie in the snow (and trust me, they came up a lot since we did them on New Years Day), I’d feel so cold and want summer, so I tried to pretend the photos weren’t there. Now that it’s officially spring, winter and I are kind of on speaking terms again. You know, like when you run into an ex and you say a polite hello, then continue on your way, but complain to your friends about it later? Winter and I are kind of like that right now.

Anyhow, Kelsie was as beautiful and sexy as always, and it wasn’t THAT cold compared the other days that week (a smokin’ hot -15C!) but cold enough I can definitely admire her for doing these. If it looks like she has dandruff, it’s just snow I got sick of Photoshopping out!

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I really wanted to do a photo shoot when I went to Las Vegas, so I was thrilled to find out Erin would be there while I was, along with one of her sisters, Krista, and her mom, Verna. I photographed Erin’s wedding to Jonathan last summer with Litwin Photography, and will be shooting her sister Bethany’s wedding this upcoming summer (my last Litwin booking), so I’ve come to know the family quite well!

Verna didn’t want to be in the photos, but Krista was easy to talk into doing a few with her sister. In my limited location scouting time, I picked out the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace as our location, and was really glad I did! In under an hour we shot outside AND on all three levels of that part of the mall, so we got tons of awesome shots.

Ideally, I would have kicked all the other people out of the area and gotten some cool photos on the spiral escalators, but well… maybe one day when I’m famous and have that sort of pull ;)

I was also really disappointed that no one else tried to jump into our photos like when Sarah and I did our shoot! I guess this time, we shot too early in the evening for passerbys to be drunk!

Thanks, girls, for being my models!

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On Sunday I got to partake in one of the most exciting shoots I’ve ever done! A group of photographers made up of Lethbridge folk and Calgary Strobists got together with the U of L swimming team, a group of models, a fashion designer (Caitlin Power), a makeup artist, and a scuba diver (Chris) for what can only be described as epic. Michael Warf, Kevin Logan, Cody Belter, and I split off to do head shots of the swimmers while the other photogs set up for the fashion shoot, and then we all headed to the dive take window to take part. All the models and swim team must really be commended for the great work they did… their jobs were not easy!

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This Zombie Pinup session was done with Becca just a couple days before Halloween, and we were very lucky to find the ball park gates unlocked for our theme! I think this may be my favorite one so far.

My goal for this batch was to not use Photoshop… and I did it! (Except for the watermark, but you know…) Finally, I have conquered Lightroom’s brush tool, and am impressed at how versatile it was for what I wanted, and how much faster it was than doing the same thing in Photoshop. Oh Lightroom, I love you more each day.

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This was a really hard one to narrow down, because Cassandra had such a great makeup job done. Though Cassandra is great at zombie makeup herself (she did the makeup for both myself and Dino at Lethbridge’s 2008 Zombie Walk), she enlisted the help of makeup artist Jamie Ripley, and wow! Plus, Cassandra is a zombie natural and is downright scary in some of these.

The farm girl theme worked out pretty fantastic with the location we picked :)

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Okay, I admit, sometimes when it comes to me grabbing models and doing shoots I’ve planned out, I can get a little behind on editing them! So here it is, finally, the shoot I did with Cassandra just after I got back from California in November.

We revisited the old abandoned farm where we had shot her Zombie Pinups because I was just so in love with the inside of one of the barns. It has this strange (because I’m not a farm girl and don’t understand it!) series of metal rods running along grids inside, and tons of cracks for light to spill in. It was perfect for some daytime light painting! I love doing light painting on models… it’s just hard to get them to hold absolutely still for 30 seconds, but Cassandra was awesome at, you know, not breathing for that long.

Cassandra and I both hit our heads on the rods a few times, but luckily I never tripped!

After stepping over pigeon “remains” in there for long enough, she changed and we did some photos outside around the barns in her reeeeeeally cool blue corset. Not as cool as her Carmen San Diego hat, but cool nonetheless.

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