Lethbridge Weddings & Portrait Photography by Tanya Plonka

To celebrate Beatrix’s baptism, all of her family reunited in Lethbridge! She got to spend the day with both sets of grandparents and all of her aunts, uncles, and cousins on her mom and dad’s side of the family. While everyone was together again, they decided to book Pavan Park extended family photos. After a few sketchy days of nearly being rained out, we met on a beautiful morning in the river bottom. I think Beatrix was a little too tiny to appreciate all her family visiting, but her sister and all her cousins had a great time finally seeing each other again!

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This Indian Battle Park extended family photography session was a Christmas gift that was meant to take place outdoors back in December, but it was -30C the entire time the family was together! They made the wise decision to postpone until spring when everyone could actually be happy and comfortable in the photos. After a heavy rainfall earlier that day, everything was so green and fresh in the river bottom!

Three generations got together for this family session. The middle generation are part of a blended family, so they had both sets of their parents involved. Without my handy list of how everyone is related, it would have been impossible to tell sibling from cousin, sister from step sister, etc. Even all of the people who married into the family get along so comfortably with everyone that it’s hard to tell who is the sibling and who is the spouse! Everyone makes up one tightly knit family despite moving away, having children of their own, and seeing less of each other. This was such a great environment for the little kids who were happy to run to anyone there for comfort!

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This family photo ended up being downsized a little… Enough of Jenny and Herb’s grandchildren fell ill the weekend of their Nicholas Sheran extended family photos that they decided to just do photos with their children, bringing our 250 person session down to 22! Despite the lack of children, I still had to make some silly faces to get smiles out of a few of the men :)

Herb and Jenny are such a sweet couple and show so much kindness towards their family. All of the siblings are hilarious together and I got to enjoy an hour of teasing banter as they hassled each other. It was wonderful to have their children get together for their 60th wedding anniversary!

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Egidio and Betty Lou had all of their family come down to visit for Easter and decided it would be a perfect time for an extended family indoor session (especially considering the crazy wind outside!). We escaped the breeze by going to the University of Lethbridge, a fitting location as most of the adult family members had attended school there at some point!

This group is a blended family, but you’d never know with how close they all are to each other. The cousins act more like a large group of siblings and the family is so caring and warm with each other, with a healthy dose of silly.

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The Elliott family got their whole gang together for Indian Battle Park extended family photos this autumn. Everyone in this family has such a great relationship with each other! The cousins loved playing together, grandpa was a jokester with everyone, and if I hadn’t been told who the siblings were, I would have had trouble picking them out since all the in-laws feel like they’ve been friends forever. They were such an easy family to photograph because of how much they love being around each other, and what an amazing warm morning we had in the river bottom!

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Janet planned a wonderful trip with her children and their families over the long weekend. The whole family spent their weekend visiting Waterton and while there decided to have extended family photos done.

We started out our session at the Prince of Wales Hotel cliffs where “windy” doesn’t begin to describe the gusts that day! (I think that was our trade-off for narrowly escaping the forecast of rain.) We made our time there short so the children wouldn’t hate us too much… just enough time to get a few photos with the amazing view :)

The rest of the portrait session was spent at the gorgeous Cameron Falls, where we managed to sneak in right at dinner time when all the tourists were disappearing. The kids LOVED chasing the many chipmunks there so even when they got tired of photos, they had some good stress relief. It was amazing to see the love between Janet and her family. They are so special to her and she was so elated having everyone together.

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