Lethbridge Weddings & Portrait Photography by Tanya Plonka

Part 2 of the year in review features the portrait side of things! This year marked a few firsts, including my first bunny session and my first family dressed in Batman costumes. I had so much fun with every group I worked with. Thank you for letting me bring your personalities out in your photo sessions!

This year for portraits I stayed pretty local in Lethbridge, but also took a few special trips to the Crowsnest Pass, Waterton, Claresholm, and Magrath. The yearend marks a very special occasion – the 10th anniversary of when I started my business! So many of the people in these photos have been with me for years and I couldn’t have made it this far without their love and support.

I hope you enjoy looking through our best portraits of 2018 as much as I liked choosing them!

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This has been a few years in the making! I have been wanting to do photography that contrasts the human shape with architectural shapes. Lethbridge has some amazing architectural details, some of which are famous like the high level bridge while others are the neat little nooks downtown. For a long time I thought I wanted to do the photos with a ballet dancer, but soon started realizing we have such amazing yoga talent in our city. The project thus turned into urban Lethbridge yoga portraits!

It was a perfect fit to connect with Sarasponda Yoga and combine our visions for this project. Sarah is so talented at her yoga practice and I highly recommend taking classes from her. She completely rocked the vision I had and did amazing work while doing yoga poses barefoot on concrete and steel.

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Local model Cheri happened to be camping in Waterton during one of my many visits there this year. I met up with her for some colorful Waterton summer portraits before I made the drive home. Our timing worked out perfectly as that day happened to be her dog Jax’s first birthday! We brought him along for photos and this was a huge win for him because it meant playing in one of the lakes at the end of the session. Despite knowing Cheri through the photography community for many years, this was my first time working with her and she was amazing! I was so glad she happened to have pink hair that month so the photos could be extra colorful.

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A few years ago I came up with an idea to do some dreamy floral light painting photography at the Henderson Lake rose garden in Lethbridge. Some years the roses didn’t bloom all too well, while other years I never had enough free evenings. This year after seeing how gorgeous the roses were, I made it happen! I’ve worked with Tuezday as a model in the past, and her gorgeous daughter Rain has recently started modelling as well. I was eager to get Rain in front of my camera and had to get them together for this! Rain is already a natural at modelling and did fantastic holding long poses. These photos were done well after dark, requiring a flash light to focus and then using light painting to create this dreamy, fantasy effect.

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Cassandra has been dying her hair a variety of colours for the past few months and I’ve been so eager to get some photos of it! For Pride Month she got a full on rainbow added to her hair and we went out in search of the most colourful backgrounds we could find in Lethbridge for her rainbow themed pinup portraits. In addition to the usual bright murals that are downtown year round, Lethbridge Pridefest added even more variety for us as many businesses had rainbow themed front window displays!

Once it started getting a little too dark outside, we made our own bright colours indoors with gelled flashes. Cassandra came equipped with her big rainbow umbrella from Drunken Sailor and I brought my giant bag of bellydance veils for us to use as props.

This amazing hair colour and styling were both provided by Catwalk Salon.

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For the past few years, I’ve participated in the Lethbridge Scenic Portrait Project as a model and decided to be on the photographer side this year. For the project, photographers, models, and makeup artists are randomly teamed up and tasked with creating a portrait utilizing the landscape of Alberta. The final images from each group are then judged by a team of experts.

My team was made up of the super talented model Sloan MacDonald and Kristen Mrazek for makeup so I knew we could come up with something amazing! The first thing that came to mind when I thought of the landscape in Alberta this year was what has been touched by the wild fires. I wanted to turn Sloan into a Waterton fire goddess and make use of the burned trees there.

Until now I’ve been focusing on the negative effects of the recent fires by using them in my post-apocalypse series, showing that the negative future we are warned about is already happening in small pockets. However, fires can be a natural part of forest regrowth. This was definitely reinforced by all the greenery I had to photograph around and hide from these shots! The ground around the burned trees has already responded so well to the fires and is full of wild flowers. With Sloan in the flowing red dress, I wanted to add beauty to the devastation that has occurred, just as nature will slowly add its own beauty back in.

A huge thank you to Sloan, Kristen, and Cam who dealt with some of the worst wind we have ever experienced in Waterton. (On the plus side, wind and this dress are a match made in heaven!)

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