Lethbridge Weddings & Portrait Photography by Tanya Plonka

Blizzards and shutdowns couldn’t keep this family apart for their parents’ 35th anniversary celebration! Henk and Joanne’s children planned out a special celebratory reunion weekend, part of which included Designed to Dwell family photos.

The beautiful venue definitely came in handy to keep everyone warm during the blizzard that swept through Lethbridge that weekend. Despite the bad roads, everyone was able to make it down to visit their parents. Even luckier was being able to have their reunion before we all went into self-isolation across the province!

Hilda and Basil’s daughter Margaret wanted to do something special for her parents to celebrate their 55 years of marriage, so she arranged these west Lethbridge anniversary photos for them.

Both Hilda and Basil have lived very interesting lives. Hilda is a published poet and Basil used to be a professional soccer player! He was able to bring a soccer ball to the session and was very proud to show off the Brazilian flag in some of the photos.

Margaret hopped in for a few family photos, but most of the session focused on the lovely couple. Margaret and I were grinning and giggling at how cute her parents are! They are a perfect example of finding someone who can still make you laugh in 55 years.

Peggy and Lourens celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary last year and thought that would be a great time to get the gang together for anniversary family photos! The group has grown by quite a few little members since our last session, which meant a lot more dancing around and silly songs by the adults this time.

The little kids did great considering they all wanted to run around and explore the nature park instead of pose (especially the littlest ones who had just learned to walk), but many aunts and uncles came to the rescue.

To switch things up from last time, we visited Indian Battle Park in Lethbridge. One thing that was like their last session was the risk of being rained out again! We had better luck though and no umbrellas were needed this year :)

It’s been such an honour watching this family grow, and I hope to follow them through their next 30 years of anniversaries!

When Erica contacted me to do her 10th anniversary family photos, I thought it would be fun to dig up her and Bill’s wedding photos from a decade ago for comparison. This is one of the weddings I did before I had my own business so it was going way back! Some of the photos were a little embarrassing to look back on, but I loved seeing how much I’ve improved since then.

Some observations:
1. Crazy Cakes has always had that square hole in the wall. (I’d normally edit that out, but it’s cute to see the building hasn’t aged much!)
2. Ten years ago the Dutch angle was very popular in wedding photography and I had a lot of trouble pulling out old photos to recreate that didn’t make me dizzy with their tilt. Wikipedia says, “the Dutch angle is one of many cinematic techniques often used to portray psychological uneasiness or tension in the subject being filmed,” making me scratch my head as to how this was such a huge wedding photography trend!
3. Erica and Bill are just as in love as 10 years ago.

It’s amazing to see the happy family they’ve grown into. Their two boys are such joyful, energetic kids and had a blast finding new surfaces to jump off of throughout the photos. We started the session downtown to revisit a few of the locations we had used in their wedding photos. Next we headed to the Helen Schuler Nature Reserve so we could make giant piles of leaves for throwing. I think our success at having fun is directly related to how many leaves the boys had to pull out of their shirts when we were done!

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Haley contacted me with a great vision for Waterton sunset anniversary photos. She and Stephen wanted to celebrate their anniversary trip to Waterton by recreating some of their wedding photos! They dressed very similar to their wedding day with one exception: Haley’s original wedding dress had been stolen during a break-in, and she managed to track down a nearly identical dress. Luckily they scheduled just days before the smoke got bad so we were able to get amazing views of the mountains with only a little bit of haze. After we finished in the town (which has a crazy early sunset thanks to the mountains!) we drove to the lookout to take full advantage of the setting sun.

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Louis is a true romantic. For his 50th wedding anniversary with Laurie he surprised her with a trip to Waterton, a stay at the historic Prince of Wales Hotel, a fun weekend filled with exploring the park, and a Waterton anniversary portrait session.

I met with them at the hotel where we decided against the overlook photos in the original plan… because my goodness, was it windy! Instead we found shelter lower down at Linnett Lake and within the townsite by the docks, and luckily didn’t run into any of the bears that have been frequenting the town. (Though we were told we missed a bear visit by 15 minutes!)

Don’t let the fact that they prefer to be serious in photos fool you… throughout the session, Louis and Laurie constantly made each other laugh and are obviously still so in love after all these years. I wish them another happy 50 years together :)

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