It's event season, baby, and in between photographing fundraisers, attending soirées and thoughtfully editing, I've been digging through the archives.
This was a sweet one from way back in November of 2022 — Oregon Entrepreneurs Network's annual Entrepreneurship Awards!
These photos are special to me for a number of reasons. Our event business was just re-emerging from the pandemic, and while I'd been making event photos for awhile, I don't know if I considered myself an entrepreneur just yet.
Nowadays, I tell folks all the time that entrepreneurship has been the most spiritually illuminating experience of my young life. You have to dig so deep to figure out WHY you're doing what you're doing, and for whom.
It was my first introduction to impressive leaders in the Portland entrepreneurship community like Cara Turano, Tanya Barham, Callie Christensen, Alex Gamboa Grand (to name a few) and Eugene Jung, who I later got to know as part of Livelihood NW's Increase Project.
It was also our first time photographing at Portland Art Museum, a venue that I've had the pleasure of returning to several times since.
It's fun to look back through old work and see the seeds of what has become Human Centric Media — the focus on emotionality and connection is there, if just a little less refined.
Something else entrepreneurship has taught me is that there's always more to learn, and this learning isn't linear. The bumps are part of the ride.
Special thanks go out to Anna Zamir and Isaac Watson, who collaborated on this one, back in the day.
