From Air Rescue to Digital Photography

Jacquie Tremblay is a newly enrolled Digital Photography student who spent the first part of her life flying Air Rescue.  “Airplanes are cool!” says Jacquie, by way of explanation for her original career choice. “My family is all in the medical field, but my getting into the field was happenstance. Out of high school I went into aviation and did the two year diploma program in commercial aviation and then flew Medivac for eight years or so.” There’s dramatic, there’s boring. I think 80% of flying is boring and then 20% is terror – or adrenaline, things are going wrong.

You get this opportunity to fly from Port Hardy to Bella Bella – 50 feet off the ocean and it’s beautiful, it’s majestic, it’s amazing. Or you are taking someone out of Bella Coola who’s had a major head trauma snowboarding and it’s all you can do to keep them alive to Vancouver and the paramedics arrive. Then spend an hour cleaning blood out of the plane. You’ve got those two extremes.

How Jacquie Became A Photographer

After a break to have her kids, Jacquie re-entered the industry working for Westjet in dispatch. “I was doing all the preflight planning and monitoring, using my skills in more of an office situation. Dispatch was a lot of shift work -12 hours locked in a room; I was away from my desk for a grand total of 8 minutes in a 12 hour shift.”

“Shiftwork, not sleeping, kids are like ‘who are you’, family drama” all precipitated the family’s move back to the Okanagan (both Jacquie and her husband are from here). “Coming here created a space for me to do something new, and photography was always a keen interest, so why not change it to a career?!”

Thinking about a career change like Jacquie? Read more about our photography program here!