Lethbridge Portrait & Wedding Photography & Design by Tanya Plonka

Last year I when I did the oh-so-cute wedding of Joel and Cel I was able to meet their wonderful circle of friends and family, and by autumn felt like a part of the family. Now it is such an honor to be working with Joan and Erwin who are a part of that circle and getting married next month. Today we met up to take some engagement photos, and I had a blast with them (and they are just as cute and fun as the others are!). It was a gorgeous day, and I got to try out my new (awesome) wide angle lens once we went downtown.

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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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Today I had the pleasure of shooting a local actor for some personal photos to “commemorate” his long hair. Colin obviously has been growing his hair out for a while and tomorrow he is cutting it all off for an audition tape. As someone with long hair, I understand what a big deal this is. (In grade one I decided to cut it really short – but never again!)

He was such a natural in front of the camera – this surely speaks well of his acting :P

Keep an eye out for him… you might see him in big movies one day soon! Good luck with your audition, Colin!

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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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On New Years Day I took a very brave Kelsie out for some winter photos. Henderson Lake, the Lethbridge location normally most overrun with wedding and portrait photographers, was absolutely barren except for a jogger and an unfortunate man stuck in a snowbank, trying to dig his vehicle out… oh, and us fools! It started to snow just as we left Kelsie’s house, which added such a gorgeous haze to the background of the photos. (I won’t complain about how long it took to Photoshop the snow flecks off of Kelsie.)

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I still have two more sets of Zombie Pinups to go through, but that might not even happen until next year… but at least for now, here are Dylan’s zombie photos! She brought along two lovely outfits, and this was the most public location I’ve done these yet – right on one of the busiest streets in Lethbridge, by the mall, and in the park. It proved my point that when people encounter strange things, they pretend they don’t see anything! Only one woman was brave enough to ask, and that was only because she recognized me from the cover the Lethbridge Herald the week before from the Zombie Walk :P

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