Lethbridge Weddings & Portrait Photography by Tanya Plonka

It was such a great year for families finally being able to get together, and that meant many opportunities to photograph multiple generations. Shirley and Richard managed to get a whopping FOUR generations together for their late autumn extended family photos in Lethbridge’s river bottom.

We had such a perfect golden hour while the weather was still warm at the end of fall. It gave the little kids a perfect opportunity to run around on adventures between photos, and give their dads chasing them some exercise.

It was so great to see Mandy and Chris again at their Henderson Lake winter mini session! I hadn’t seen them since their wedding and they’ve since added to their family. The older boys really had their work cut out for them with wrangling their little brother, and we soon found a magical stick that convinced him to take photos.

We were lucky this year that their Christmas family photo actually got to have snow in it!

We had such a great time hanging out with Santa and Mrs. Clause at the Big Farmer’s Market hosted by Lethbridge & District Exhibition this year! Thank you to everyone who came out for photos with Santa. It was wonderful seeing so many familiar faces and meeting so many new families. Santa was fantastic for hamming it up anytime he had his beard tugged by a baby and he always went the extra mile, including laying on the ground if needed!

I was pretty sad to learn that one of my favourite Lethbridge families was moving to Calgary. However, things still managed to align during their first year in their new home and we were able to schedule a session while I was passing through the city! Melissa suggested Fish Creek Park as a potential location and I got to work researching what would be the best spot in this large nature reserve. Once I found the beautiful forest backgrounds, I knew we had to do Shannon Terrace family photos!

This part of the park looks like a forest in the mountains. I was shocked that this existed right in Calgary. Everywhere we wandered we found huge trees, views of the creek, and fun fallen logs to climb on. The kids may be hitting age ranges where they have more disagreements with their siblings than affection, but they could all agree that the exploring was still fun to do together :)

Bobbi-Jo and Ryan celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary last year and decided that would be a great time to update their family photos! Like most families, they started spacing out regular photos once their babies turned into bigger kids, so it’s been a few years since I last saw them. I can’t believe I’ve been photographing this family since their oldest was a baby. How did the kids all get so big??

Their warm autumn afternoon family session was a bit of a miracle after we had to move their photos around several times trying to avoid the snow that was on its way. This gorgeous sunny session took place mere hours before the blizzard moved in!

It was wonderful to catch up with them again and the boys had so much fun having races and climbing on the bridge in Indian Battle Park.

Magrath has such a beautiful nature park, so I was totally on board when Trish and John asked me to come visit them closer to their home for their session! We had a beautiful evening for their Magrath autumn family photos. The timing worked out perfectly between that and having all their kids home at the same time!

The park is a favourite spot for the family to explore, so the kids came ready to climb the awesome big tree that grows over the water. Everyone was so great about following me through bushes and ditches for the best spots!