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.

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 into the credits I needed to graduate. 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.