Lethbridge Portrait & Wedding Photography & Design by Tanya Plonka

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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Here’s another of Lana… but with her face :)

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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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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