Lethbridge Weddings & Portrait Photography by Tanya Plonka

This summer I teamed up with a local organization to build up their image library with Lethbridge lifestyle photography. After running a model call on my website, several families were selected to take part in the project. I got to work with such a diverse group of people, from friends to past clients to some new faces! We ended up with so many natural and joyful images for the organization to choose from. Here are some of my favorites!

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I was so excited to hear from Ami-Marie when she got engaged to Devin. I’ve photographed her friends and family, and now I get to photograph her in love! Her and Devin love the fall (it’s when they are having their wedding too) and decided on Indian Battle Park autumn engagement photos while all of the amazing colours were out. We explored the Helen Schuler Nature Reserve for the first part of their session and then visited downtown Lethbridge, which was just as vibrant. Ami-Marie and Devin are so cute together, full of snuggling and laughter. I’ve been told that Devin will need to lose his beard soon for work, so I’m glad we were able to capture its glory in this engagement session!

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April, Ross, and their two boys brought their love of Halloween into their Indian Battle Park fall family photography session. I asked them to bring along a few props and was delighted with the results! The amazing pumpkin was made by April, and since the Michael mask fit her the best, mom had the honour of being the creepy one lurking in their photos. (April revealed she had the hugest grin during those photos, which you absolutely cannot see!). This family is so theatrical, making them a blast to work with.

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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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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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