By Julia Parrish
Luna Langlois says she’s loved photography since she was young, and it’s a passion that’s grown into more than a hobby. Now, she has a silver medal for her photography from the national Skills Canada competition to show for it.
It was the second time the soon-to-be École Sir John Franklin High School graduate competed on the national stage in photography. The year before, her result wasn’t so glowing.
The first time, she said she’d gone in with a very specific mindset: “I’m going to learn, and I’m going to have fun.”
“I really wanted to understand the competition more,” Langlois said in an interview with CBC’s The Trailbreaker, saying she wanted to improve her skills and learn from the other competitors.
After she got her results in 2025 — she doesn’t recall where she placed — she wasn’t disappointed. “I kind of knew it wouldn’t be that high.”
When she returned to Yellowknife, she got to work towards the goal.
“I saw what I did wrong,” she said. “For the year after, I just practiced over and over.”
The second time around, she was ready. From May 28 to 29, Langlois and competitors from other provinces created and finished a number of projects that would be scored by judges.
“Overall, it’s the portfolio at the end, with all the photos you took during the two days of competition,” Langlois said.
Once it was over, she had nine pieces in the portfolio from assignments including photographing mystery objects, staging a studio photo shoot, designing a magazine cover, and creating a composite image.
The day after the competition, she found out she’d placed second at the medal ceremony.
“I was just in shock, I thought ‘There’s no way!’,” she said.
First time for N.W.T.
For Lee Sacrey, Langlois’ result marked a milestone for the Northwest Territories on the national Skills Canada stage, although he found out about the result earlier than she did.
Sacrey is the technical chair of the Skills Canada Northwest Territories Photography Competition and is on the National Skills Canada Technical Committee for Photography. He said he was monitoring the competition and the judging.
“I knew roughly that it seemed to be going fairly well for Luna, but I couldn’t tell for sure,” Sacrey said.
After the competition ended, his colleague tallied the scores, and gave the final results to Sacrey that evening.
“He made me read the secondary placements in front of our group knowing I would just be a mess,” Sacrey said.
Sacrey has been involved with photography at Skills Canada since it was added as a competition in 2011.
In the past, the highest an N.W.T. competitor had placed was fourth or fifth.
“I was amazed those years that we got that close,” Sacrey said. “I was completely out of myself when I saw that silver medal position. It was a couple of days before I could talk about it.”
He said the differences between jurisdictions at the national level are stark. Most other provinces have better access to facilities, equipment and technology that participants from the N.W.T. generally don’t.
“I spent the better part of the first seven or eight years really modifying everything that we did, trying to give the N.W.T. as much of an advantage to be competitive as we could,” Sacrey said. “Knowing that some of the bigger provinces have available to them for coaching and resources and equipment.”
For Langlois, she doesn’t have an official coach, but she has mentors. Nikita Morozov and Brent Currie at her school, and her uncle Stephen Verhaeghe, who lives in Yellowknife, encouraged her interest in photography early on.
He gave Langlois his old camera for Christmas in 2020, a Nikon with two lenses.
“It was amazing, now I actually had equipment to start doing my photography,” Langlois said. For two years, she said she worked with that camera.
“I learned that camera all by myself, I did a lot of mistakes, messed up a lot of settings. But I’d just call him, he always helped me out.”
Two years later, she moved from Quebec to Yellowknife, and lived with her aunt and uncle. Over the year she lived with them, Verhaeghe continued sharing his photography knowledge with her.
For her second national competition, she had more at her disposal, and not just the skills she’d practiced throughout the year. Her uncle and Sacrey both lent her equipment.
“To be fair, I felt that Luna was really in it this year, and really wanted to stand on the podium,” Sacrey said. “That’s the vibe I got from when we were at territorials, just watching her new level of work I felt she was really in it to do amazing work.”
Photography will be a major part of Langlois’ life going forward. She’s majoring in journalism and communications at Holland College in P.E.I. She had applied (and been accepted) into photography as well, but chose the former, so she can reach another goal.
“Since I was a kid what I always wanted to do was travel around the world and share information.”
Related stories from around the North:
Canada: Director hopes film on Hebron relocation can both educate and spark healing, Eye on the Arctic
Norway: Certification marks help both Sami artisans and consumers, says council, Eye on the Arctic
Russia: German project to house everything published in Siberian and Arctic languages to seek new funding, Eye on the Arctic
