The End Is Near

100 days left.. I'm sorry, excuse me?! 100 DAYS? 

Remember what the last 100 days of high school were like? Here and then immediately gone? Going through the last 100 days of PrairieView has been like that.. but all jacked up on Mountain Dew. The end of school. Is. Crazy. CRAZY. End of the year projects, film, developing, printing, video, editing, shooting. I wake up from night terrors about board assignments that I've forgotten about.

One of my first board assignments for the theme "Texture"

Trying to balance all these final assignments is madness. I have all kinds of sketches and ideas for photos written down and scattered across my house that would make little to no sense if looked at by anyone but me. I also have a nice collection of negatives and prints strewn about my room. (I'm not the most organized person in the world.)

A scanned film shot from a recent rainy day. (With Sophia and Kiandra)

We recently got an assignment where we are going to be taking a photo for the end of the year with our group we're in right now. It's a really fun assignment, really interesting to work with the people in your group and plan for it, but with underlying tones of OH DEAR LORD THIS MEANS THE END IS NEAR. I don't know about everyone else, but all these assignments have a pretty bittersweet feeling for me.

At a scrapyard for a field trip.

 

I have never been too involved in school, never been a huge fan of it. Never worked too particularly hard in school either. Until PrairieView. PrairieView has been one of the best experiences of my life. There's not a whole lot of things that are better than being surrounded by amazing, like-minded people all day, and learning about something you're passionate about from a group of extremely talented and experienced teachers. (That was a legitimate statement, not me sucking up, by the way.)

At the Aviation Museum.

Looking through my photos on my computer would be a pretty good indication of how the year has gone so far. Good photos, bad photos, really obvious improvement, and splashes of just total ridiculousness. I ended up choosing my major to be in decorative art. I always assumed I would lean more towards portraiture of some kind (which I still love), but I found through this year that I really enjoy taking pictures of places and things.

At Fort Whyte.

There's been so many opportunities and ideas given to us for shooting new things throughout the year that I would never have had or thought of on my own. One of the big things being learning about film developing and printing. I always had an interest in film and I had been in a darkroom a few times before, but I never really got too into it. I'm now slightly obsessed with the world of film. Using different film and film cameras at the school has been amazing. For example, I never would've tried a large format camera, and now I'm using it for my major Analogue Techniques assignment and I love it.

Off my first roll of double exposures I ever shot

A double exposure on my Diana F+

Another shot from the Diana F+

A shot of Kaylene from a borrowed Holga from the school

From a roll of film we developed in coffee

I can't even explain how much I've enjoyed this year, despite the hard parts. Everyone at PrairieView is amazing and I've gotten so much out of this. I can't wait to see where all of this takes me. Now just to get my life together and struggle through the next little while.. As a single tear rolls down my cheek, I'm off to do copious amounts of editing and consume as much coffee as I can. Enough of this sob fest.

Cassie Steep
PV Diploma Student
2012-13