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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For the past few years, I’ve participated in the Lethbridge Scenic Portrait Project as a model and decided to be on the photographer side this year. For the project, photographers, models, and makeup artists are randomly teamed up and tasked with creating a portrait utilizing the landscape of Alberta. The final images from each group are then judged by a team of experts.

My team was made up of the super talented model Sloan MacDonald and Kristen Mrazek for makeup so I knew we could come up with something amazing! The first thing that came to mind when I thought of the landscape in Alberta this year was what has been touched by the wild fires. I wanted to turn Sloan into a Waterton fire goddess and make use of the burned trees there.

Until now I’ve been focusing on the negative effects of the recent fires by using them in my post-apocalypse series, showing that the negative future we are warned about is already happening in small pockets. However, fires can be a natural part of forest regrowth. This was definitely reinforced by all the greenery I had to photograph around and hide from these shots! The ground around the burned trees has already responded so well to the fires and is full of wild flowers. With Sloan in the flowing red dress, I wanted to add beauty to the devastation that has occurred, just as nature will slowly add its own beauty back in.

A huge thank you to Sloan, Kristen, and Cam who dealt with some of the worst wind we have ever experienced in Waterton. (On the plus side, wind and this dress are a match made in heaven!)

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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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