Lethbridge Weddings & Portrait Photography by Tanya Plonka

The results for the Lethbridge Sun Times Best of the Best contest, where residents vote for their favorite businesses, are finally in, and I am proud to announce I received second place for photographers! Thank you so much to everyone who voted and for all the support everyone has given me over the past year. I love what I do, and it is worth all the late nights and lost weekends to be able to do this for a living. THANK YOU!

On Sunday I joined a few photographer friends to go to Calgary to go to [b]ecker‘s workshop at the U of C. We spent the entire day listening to his thoughts on all aspects of what he does – working with clients, how he runs his business, how he manages his photos, and how he has built his image/brand. The day was worth tenfold what we were charged to be there; I came out with so many great ideas and totally inspired! I’m so glad I was able to go to this.

p.s. The cowboy hat was a gift from the organizer to welcome him to Calgary :)

Onto the photos! (more…)

Two weeks ago I attended my very first Photoshop World, which was held in Boston MA. I was joined by co-worker and fellow photographer Michael Warf, and we had a phenomenal time! I learnt a huge amount at the convention, and our after hours shooting filled my portfolio with some wonderful things.

Naturally, on the slideshow above I had to pay homage to one of my all time favorite bands, the band who “saved” me from pop music, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Secretly I wished terribly to run into at least one member of the band while there… but sadly I don’t think they hang around Photoshop conventions!

Click below to go on to the photos!
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How could I NOT use the most cliched song for this? ;)

I figured it would be a good idea to blog about WPPI 2009 in Las Vegas before I run off to Photoshop World in Boston next week!

This is a longer entry, so there are more after the cut!
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I just wanted to leave a quick note to say I am featured this month on the Portuguese photography site Pontos de Vista for my zombie photos. Woot!

If you have some free time, dig around the site… there are some really cool photos on there! It’s addictive like Flickr!

(After March, you should be able to find my gallery from this link.)

WPPI 2009 is so very soon. I can’t believe I am going to Vegas in one week already. Time really flies, and I don’t feel ready at all!

Because I’m getting really buzzed about the Convention and Tradeshow, I thought I’d re-post the blog I made about WPPI 2008 (for some reason I only put it on the Litwin Photography blog and not my own).
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In March Sarah and I flew down to Vegas for our first ever WPPI (Wedding and Portrait Photographers International) Convention and Tradeshow, leaving the Litwins back in Lethbridge to look after Jaxen.

We arrived a few days early and had the weekend to play around, but I was eagerly awaiting the tradeshow so I could pick up my new 40D (among other goodies).

At the opening reception we got a feel of how big the convention really was – over 20,000 photographers were in attendance!

Jesh de Rox in the bottom left corner… I suspected it was him but hadn’t actually seen him before, so I played shy :P

The Young Guns Show was one of my favorite parts of the convention, featuring some awesome photographers all under 30. I was excited that Mike Larson came ready to do a demo. Last summer we saw this video of Mike’s infamous camera toss, and I was pretty stoked to see it in real life!
(Here’s a link to the video of him in action)

You can see how daring (or terrifying!) it is even from where we were sitting in the back. (That object at the top of the photo is the camera, if you couldn’t tell.)

The Tradeshow took up a ton of time, and I STILL could have spent an extra day there!

(photo by Sarah)

Here is Sarah standing on the new Olympus camera. I tried to talk her into Canon, but to no avail.

At the tradeshow, I ran into familiar faces: Mark from de Jourdan’s with his wife Kristina! I never had time to arrange a meetup with them before leaving, so it was quite miraculous to run into them among the thousands of photographers who were there.

Sarah and I both saw some amazing speakers, but my favorite times were when we went out to the strip to try my new camera. We quickly learnt that when you have a camera and a model in Vegas at night, you get a lot of people who think they should be in your photos! Sarah was usually the model, but I took a few turns in front of the camera and even Sarah couldn’t help but admit Canon was great.

We barely slept while we were there but we had a great time, and I’m excited to go back again next year!
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Here are a few more pictures that weren’t in the original entry after the cut…
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