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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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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One day when we were driving home from a wedding in Waterton, I finally really noticed the old abandoned gas station on the highway. I have driven past it many times before, but there was something about this trip that made it finally connect in my brain. I’m always on the lookout for new ideas in my post apocalypse series. Seeing the gas station right after the Kenow Wildfires made everything click into place!

It’s a bit of a drive to take a model out there, so I took a chance and asked Cam. He was still sporting his mohawk which would be PERFECT for something like this. Cam hates having his photo taken so I was expecting something like, “Are you crazy?” or a firm no. Imagine my surprise when he agreed!

We patiently waited for the snow in Waterton to melt, and the little that was left behind looks like ashes. Everything worked so well together. The burned trees were a haunting but perfect setting for the atmosphere we wanted. The only props we brought along are the ones Cam is wearing or holding, but the locations provided us with amazing still life, which you will see below (I think the apocalypse must have happened in the 90s).

I had to hold off on sharing this for a while as I used the same forest as part of the Scenic Portrait Project. I’m so happy to finally share!

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I was really excited about my locations for spring blossoms this year and wanted to test them all out before my mini sessions started. (Plus I love any excuse to take photos in the flowers!) Why not spend a morning doing some beautiful spring blossom women’s portraiture? I’ve been wanting to work with local model Sadie for a while and she happened to be available right when I wanted to schedule these. Double win! Sadie was amazing to work with and brought along a fantastic wardrobe to go with the spring colours.

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Leslie is happiest when it snows, so when her friend treated her to a headshot session as a Christmas gift, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect! We planned her Lethbridge winter headshot session at the very last minute (the snow was falling that night and would melt within two days) and headed over to Aperture Park on the west side with Leslie’s favourite winter coats in tow. Leslie is a talented author and a joy to be around, so I wanted to make sure her new book portraits matched her personality.

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