Lethbridge Weddings & Portrait Photography by Tanya Plonka

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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After photographing many of their family member’s weddings, I was excited to hear Makayla and Cornell were the next in line to wed! We started off their Picture Butte late summer wedding photos at the family’s beautiful property that backs onto the coulees. Just like a few years ago at a sibling’s wedding, the view was very smoky! Luckily the smoke looks amazing in the coulees :)

Their nieces and nephews were (mostly) excited to have a photographer come visit and gave us all kinds of adorable poses! We had quite a few family members tasked with removing photobombing children from photos, and later the dogs and barn kittens started crashing the shoot too!

The Picture Butte Golf Club was very generous with letting us run around the course for photos and explore the grounds with a whole fleet of golf carts.

Makayla and Cornell have such a great group of people they call friends. Like the other weddings, we spent the day in laughter and never knew what silliness to expect when we turned around. They have such great senses of humour and will have an amazing lifetime together making each other laugh.

Congratulations, Makayla and Cornell!

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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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Just one day after second shooting for Melanie, I got to do it again with Kassey from Red Tree Photography! This time we had a Trinity Reformed Church wedding with Jessica and Josiah, who met at college and fell in love. Josiah’s family travelled from Ontario to meet Jessica’s Alberta family and have their beautiful ceremony at Jess’s family’s church.

Jessica and Josiah looked amazing, especially with her flower crown and his red bow tie. We took the wedding party to Indian Battle Park for portraits after the ceremony, then just the bride and groom downtown before heading to their reception at the Coast Hotel.

Congratulations, Jess and Josiah!

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You might recognize Alyssa from her solo performances, or from her wedding photos I did a few years ago. She’s been busy this year with her band Coyote Junction and I got together with them in Lethbridge to update their band photos to use in promotional materials. Since they are a country rock band, we went with a look that was rustic (but not dilapidated!) and there were so many great textures to fit this look where we wandered around. The neighbourhood we chose happened to be full of people who knew members of the band, so we had to take a few breaks to say hello! It was like they had an entourage following them ;)

You can hear music from Coyote Junction by checking out their Facebook page!

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I know it’s early in the year, but I think Kim and Nathaniel may be one of my most passionate couples this wedding season. The way they looked at each other and snuck kisses even when the camera was down was so romantic!

We started out the day greeting them as they arrived at the NRC church in Lethbridge and followed Kim as she walked down the aisle to her soon to be husband. For photo locations we focused on Lethbridge Research Centre wedding portraits, which was stunningly green this time of year, followed by a quick visit to Henderson Lake and the old red firehall downtown.

Kim and Nathaniel were surrounded by so much happiness and laughter throughout the day. From Nathaniel’s friends’ dry humor to Kim’s sisters’ theatrics, we rarely stopped laughing!

Congratulations, Kim and Nathaniel!

p.s. Thank you to Melanie from Photo Expressions for being my second shooter for the day!

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