Lethbridge Weddings & Portrait Photography by Tanya Plonka

Last Saturday Lethbridge was graced by the Kabuki Guns Burlesque (KGB) dancers from Calgary who put on a stellar show at Henotic. I was excited to see this as my only burlesque encounters up to that point had been seeing Big John Bates and the Voodoo Dollz, but I knew there was a whole other world of burlesque out there I had yet to experience!

Just after the girls arrived in Lethbridge, they took some time for an awesome photoshoot with myself, Michael (for a brief while before family matters called), and the lovely Starsha who assisted with lighting (and she has a fantastic eye for detail, so she doubled as our stylist!). We started with the girls’ solo outfits, and I loved their fun costumes. Every costume totally reflected each girl’s personality… and I was especially thrilled when Princess Leia walked out…

[No nudity follows, but burlesque costumes may not be the most “safe for work” ;)]
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Finally, I can show a little more than my Hotel Arts teaser from a week ago!

We started the shoot by doing some promo photos for the Hotel’s lounge, Raw Bar, and then took to the gorgeous lobby areas to do fashion photography. The hotel was also gracious enough to lend us a room, so we had a chance to do boudoir work as well. I would have loved a two day shoot out of this as I ran out of time and was only able to extensively work with one of the models… At least it leaves more ideas for the next time!

There’s no full nudity in the photos, but if you’ll get in trouble looking at girls in corsets or barely covered in showers except for steam on the windows when you’re at work, make sure you only check these out when you’re in private!

I’d also like to point out I love doing boudoir work, so if you are interested, please contact me! I’ve been doing it for a while, but only recently with models, so I haven’t been able to show it off before these last few shoots!

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While at the Estate Party at Photoshop World in Boston, Michael and I met Jodi, a graphic designer and model from Illinois, and luckily she was up for doing a photo shoot with us the next day! We chose to do a boudoir shoot with her at the hotel to show off all her great ink; this girl knows how to choose tattoo artists. I’d also like to point out that she is approaching 50, and look at her! I hope I age that well!

She brought along a wonderful selection of wigs for the shoot, but her real hawk was pretty fun too :)

Thanks so much for shooting with us Jodi, and thanks to Ian for assisting with lighting!

I kept this entry safe-for-work, so feel free to click:
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This Zombie Pinup session was done with Becca just a couple days before Halloween, and we were very lucky to find the ball park gates unlocked for our theme! I think this may be my favorite one so far.

My goal for this batch was to not use Photoshop… and I did it! (Except for the watermark, but you know…) Finally, I have conquered Lightroom’s brush tool, and am impressed at how versatile it was for what I wanted, and how much faster it was than doing the same thing in Photoshop. Oh Lightroom, I love you more each day.

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Damien over at Your Photo Tips did a great little write up on my zombie pinups today…

The undead can be really be hard to flatter in photography. I mean, most times you really want to capture the “life” and the “soul” of a person when doing a portrait. But what do you do when your subjects have no life and no soul?

You do what Tanya Plonka would do. You capture them in style!
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It’s always a wonderful pleasure to see photographers making waves and breaking trends all while having fun with their craft. Tanya is a wonderful photographer that exhibits a true love of photography and it really shows in her images.

You can read the whole thing over at yourphototips.com

Thanks, Damien!

This was a really hard one to narrow down, because Cassandra had such a great makeup job done. Though Cassandra is great at zombie makeup herself (she did the makeup for both myself and Dino at Lethbridge’s 2008 Zombie Walk), she enlisted the help of makeup artist Jamie Ripley, and wow! Plus, Cassandra is a zombie natural and is downright scary in some of these.

The farm girl theme worked out pretty fantastic with the location we picked :)

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