Over the next few months, I’ll be posting some of my favorite photos I took during my contract with the City of Lethbridge. Though I always loved looking at this house, last year was the first time I actually stopped, got out of the car, and took photos of it! The Annandale House on 13th Street South is actually a Lethbridge Historic site, so this was a learning experience for me. Driving by does not do it justice as their yard is filled with numerous Christmas decorations that you can only see from the sidewalk. There is such a great presence around this house at Christmas :)

Winter is just around the corner, so I wanted to share some memories from the summer! It’s not too often I take photos that don’t have people in them, but back in July when I had a dinner break for Erika and Josh’s wedding, I wandered around my mom’s flowers with my macro lens and found some neat things :)

I love this warm weather we’ve been having, so I’ve been going around stalking out more birds :)

The clouds this day were amazing!

After all that trouble finding the three pelicans last time, it was suddenly a lot easier!

These geese patiently rested on Whoop Up Drive’s concrete while I wandered around.

I think this was the first time I had ever seen a robin running and not hopping!

It finally feels like spring is here and the birds no longer sound angry about having returned to a lot of snow so I felt it was a perfect time to go out and take some photos of them. Any excuse to be out in the new found sunshine is a good one. I was most eager to track down some pelicans, which I’ve been wistfully watching out the windows of the university as they fly like pterodactyls over the Old Man River, but since I’m a little scared of them (their wing spans can be up to 10 feet!!!), I started out slow with some more domesticated birds. I live close to (a) water, and (b) a high school, so the seagulls were an easy one to cross off the list first. Nicholas Sheran had the first of the season’s song birds and ducks, but the pickings were still slim. The Canadian Geese are always easy to find by the nature reserve next to the golf course, but the pelicans (the aloof, terrifying birds they are) took a bit of tracking down…

Crows are always easy to find around here. Several were hanging out in the trees at Nicholas Sheran when we arrived.

Is this the red-winged blackbird? There are usually so many of these in Lethbridge, but I could only find the one.

Bottoms up!

A robin doing some grooming

Chickadees are so cute, but hard to stalk because they jump around so frantically.

While I was at the University, I thought I should stop for some gopher (aka ground squirrel) photos. They aren’t the brightest animals, but they’re still pretty cute.

The geese were not impressed we interrupted their hangout on the path. They honked a lot, then retreated to the water.

By now we had been walking around for over two hours, and still no pelicans. We finally found three of them at one last spot in the river bottom where I remember seeing them, sitting on a pile of rocks in the river. After patiently waiting a whole ten minutes, they annoyed each other with some pecking (I suppose with pelicans it’s more like jabbing) and took off in a beautiful flight.

The seagull looks like a little spec in comparison.

PTERODACTYLS. I’m telling you.

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!

Without further ado…

Last month, Greg and Tarah had a fairy tale wedding in the mountains at Lake Louise. They spent their entire weekend at the Fairmont Chateau, which was an absolutely beautiful, romantic, and perfect venue to get married.

I brought Jan along for the weekend, and on our drive up I was quite worried about the weather… the temperature that morning hit -50C (with wind chill)!!! It had warmed up a bit (-20C) by the time we arrived in Lake Louise in the afternoon, but as we scouted out our locations for the next day, our hands kept freezing up every ten minutes. We were SO lucky the next day because it warmed up so much! I would have been so heartbroken if we couldn’t spend much time out in the snow for photos.

Tarah and Greg perfected every detail of their wedding (and even took part in the reception decor and designing the cake!). Everywhere we went, little girls stared in awe, commenting to their moms that they just saw a snow princess. We had tourists following us all day, snapping photos of the couple. Obviously they were more beautiful than the scenery :) They oozed with love, they were gorgeous, and we had more backgrounds than we knew what to do with.

Everything was perfect all day, and I’ve never had so much trouble narrowing down photos as I have this time. I have to warn you now, this post is more photo heavy than any I’ve done before, so you might not want to look at it from your iPhone ;)

SHOES! SHOES! These are worthy of Lady Gaga. I died a little when I saw them.

Flower girl Tegan was really interested in everything we were doing.

Tegan was excited to get going, and got dressed on her own while Tarah was being laced up.

Jan doubled as a wardrobe assistant.

The ceremony took place in the beautiful Victoria Room.

Greg checked his watch every minute that he waited :)

Tegan’s dad and Maid of Honor Marta’s husband sneaks a photo as they pass

The first look

Tegan started the thumbs up that day, and it caught on

This next set of photos were so hard to get. This was right in front of a set of elevators, and every minute or two they would open with a new set of skiers. The tourists, not wanting to get in our way, would pause even though we were frantically waving them through so we could resume faster. It’s all about faking how romantic the location actually was :)

The dinner was soooo amazing.

Tegan decided to help remove the pine cones during the cake cutting.

During the reception, we kidnapped the couple for some more formals around the Chateau. It was beautiful and quiet now that most of the tourists were in bed so we were able to get some really dreamy shots of Tarah and Greg.

On our way out, I set up a quick photo with one of the reception favors from the night before :)