Lethbridge Weddings & Portrait Photography by Tanya Plonka

I was pretty excited when Steven came to me with the idea he had for photos to send to his family overseas – he wanted to do an old style, film noir shoot. I love my job! I had recently picked up some new lighting equipment and this was the perfect time to really put it to the test. Steven was an exceptional model, despite his claims that he didn’t know what to do and felt silly. I guess it makes a difference when you put a suit on someone! (more…)

Alex and Todd had a beautiful, intimate wedding with only their immediate family at the ceremony and then a party for more of their friends and family in the evening. Todd’s grandmother, Vivian, though unable to speak due to illness, was at times the life of the party – grinning wildly, enjoying champagne, and constantly giving her thumbs up when things were wonderful to her. She was such a ham in front of the camera, it was hard to get candid photos of her! The whole day was beautiful and romantic, and there was so much happiness and love among everyone. (more…)

This year I did Lethbridge’s Whoop Up Days a little differently… instead of going on rides and packing along a point and shoot, I brought a tripod and a good camera! I dragged myself out there with the intention to stay just a little past twilight, which would be about two hours; Cam was too sick to go and I was in a grumpy, tired mood all day, so it took a lot of effort to leave the house. Once I got there, I had so much fun taking photos that I stayed for over three hours :) I’ve been wanting to do this for a few years now and glad I finally crossed it off the to-do list.

Sadly they raised the price of individual ride tickets so I opted not to take in a ride, but instead enjoyed a jumbo “elephant ear” as a reward when I was finished, and ate it while watching Prism. Heck yeah! (more…)

What a treat to do this wedding! I’ve casually known Kim for quite a few years now, but we were more online friends even though we lived in the same city. Then she moved away, and met Peter, and fell in love! I was a little gushy to learn that they met on an online dating site because (1) that’s a great way to fall for someone’s personality first, and (2) that’s how Cam and I met :)

Though the two are based out of Calgary/Edmonton now, they wanted to have a cute small town wedding and spent many months looking for just the right place. They settled on Rosebud, Alberta, which is pretty much the cutest small town I have ever seen. Everything is extremely well maintained and it has a thriving art scene despite being nearly in the middle of no where. As luck would have it, some classic car enthusiasts were having a get together in Rosebud that day and offered their chauffeur services at no charge. So generous!

Since Peter is an actor and both are huge music enthusiasts, their intimate wedding was full of artists, actors, and musicians (my kind of people!) and everyone was so warm and generous that it didn’t take long for me to feel like family. I had so much fun with everyone, for as you will see, they don’t take everything quite so seriously… :) (more…)

Without further ado…

Last month, Greg and Tarah had a fairy tale wedding in the mountains at Lake Louise. They spent their entire weekend at the Fairmont Chateau, which was an absolutely beautiful, romantic, and perfect venue to get married.

I brought Jan along for the weekend, and on our drive up I was quite worried about the weather… the temperature that morning hit -50C (with wind chill)!!! It had warmed up a bit (-20C) by the time we arrived in Lake Louise in the afternoon, but as we scouted out our locations for the next day, our hands kept freezing up every ten minutes. We were SO lucky the next day because it warmed up so much! I would have been so heartbroken if we couldn’t spend much time out in the snow for photos.

Tarah and Greg perfected every detail of their wedding (and even took part in the reception decor and designing the cake!). Everywhere we went, little girls stared in awe, commenting to their moms that they just saw a snow princess. We had tourists following us all day, snapping photos of the couple. Obviously they were more beautiful than the scenery :) They oozed with love, they were gorgeous, and we had more backgrounds than we knew what to do with.

Everything was perfect all day, and I’ve never had so much trouble narrowing down photos as I have this time. I have to warn you now, this post is more photo heavy than any I’ve done before, so you might not want to look at it from your iPhone ;) (more…)

I am veeeeery late on editing and posting these, but thrilled to finally get them up here. Back in September I alluded to working with a Utah photographer who could easily be David Bowie’s lovechild (everywhere he went, anyone who met him would exclaim how much he looked like Bowie, which I imagine gets pretty tiring after a while!). Adam met up with me for a fashion shoot in the lobby/bar at THEhotel in Las Vegas, and we got a solid 35 minutes in before security put a stop to it. Considering I’ve been told to move at least every 10 minutes to prevent that from happening, I think we fared pretty well!

THEhotel is gorgeous and when I first saw it a few years ago I instantly wanted to work with a model in there. Adam was a perfect (and very dapper) match. I was hoping to likewise model for him, but we ran out of time. Hopefully at next year’s Photoshop World! (more…)