Skills Canada Competition
In highschool, my photography teacher was involved with Skills Canada and always encouraged his students to go compete. I never actually went while I was in highschool but in my second year of university, I was trying to figure out a way to get some mandatory arts credits without having to do the art classes that my school offered haha.
So, that year I figured out a way to convince the head of the arts department to allow me to bypass the pre-reqs to do a directed studies course in art and turn competing in Skills Canada to the credits I needed. I had to create a syllabus that included papers and all the other extra readings that would make it qualify for credits and then leading up to the competition, I had to submit my progress for each section of the competition.
Basically, Skills Canada is a competition for the trades. The competition is two days and timed so all of the projects given are to be completed on that specific day of the competition. It really tested my time management because the assignments were given in the morning so coming up with the idea, shooting and editing had to be efficient. The first day there were 4 projects due and the second day there were 3 projects due with 3 less hours than the day before.
I competed in provincials and placed Gold which made me eligible to compete at the national level in the university level! Unfortunately, I made an error on my exporting settings and lost a point for each photo I submitted (8 points total) and came in third only short 1.5 points to have made second!! Luckily though, I still placed and received a medal for my effort and got an A+ in the class, so overall it was a great decision to compete. I also got extremely lucky because I planned on competing again the following year and going to Newfoundland for the nationals but they decided to cut the university level of the competition and only keep the highschool level due to stronger interest in the highschool level across Canada.
Anywaaaays, these are my photos from the national level of the competition! I’ll explain what each project required.
Mystery Object 1
So, first thing they gave us in the morning was a few gummy worms and some paper clips. Basically the assignment was to go and be creative with these mystery objects! For some reason, I actually struggled coming up with ideas but finally got an idea when I saw gummy worms in the vending machine. That’s how I created “the great escape” haha.
Three Raw Images
This project was about capturing 3 images and submitting them with absolutely no editing. The idea behind this is to test the ability to properly expose photos in camera as well as testing the ability to frame photos correctly without having to crop them later.
There are many talented photographers out there who heavily rely on editing afterwards to make their photos good. There’s nothing wrong with that but it creates more efficient post processing when more is done in camera!
Composite Image
This project was made to test photoshop skills. We were given a file of random images that were all different file types (there were a few more I didn’t include below)and we were told to create anything that combined the images.
The only guidelines were that we had to use:
1 natural landscape photo
1 city landscape photo
1 photo of the girl
1 light painting photo
Optional - a galaxy photo (i didn’t use that one)
Below was my final image!
Portrait
This project was pretty straight forward. Everyone used the same model and she had 3 outfits to choose from. Everyone was given 15 minutes to set up, shoot and clean up the set and then 30 minutes to edit the portrait. This was the only project that had a strict deadline on how much time you could spend on it!
I decided to create a high key image instead of a portrait because I wanted it to match my overall portfolio and I wanted it to stand out against the others.
Personal Project
The concept was to choose a theme and create a series of photos that connected to that theme as well as to each other. I decided to go with the theme of creativity & each photo also had its own title that tied back to the theme. (1) inspired by something, (2) create something and then to (3) inspire others to create.
I was limited to my surroundings at the expo centre and couldn’t leave the building aside from the time restraint.
There were some benches along different competition areas so I took a white piece of material and a white piece of plexiglass and created a wall-less product setup. I really pushed myself with this one because I had a lot of editing to do in photoshop because I used hair elastics and sticky tack to keep the crayons up. I had to edit out the hair elastics and create new tips of the crayons in the first photo and that took a lot of time haha.
Mystery Object 2
On day 2, we were given the mystery object of glitter. I felt pretty stumped again on what to do with it so I decided to stick it on a model and do a killer headshot. Admittedly, this was probably my weakes submission. Even though the photo quality was amazing, I should have had a better emphasis on the glitter. Nonetheless, here is a great headshot!
Portrait Editing
This was the final project given to us! We were given a portrait of a girl and the objective was to edit the photo to keep it as natural as possible but edited enough to be put into a high fashion magazine.