As many of you know, Corporate Event Photography is my speciality and photography passion. I started seeing events canceled (and loosing a LOT of business) in early March 2020….when most people were still just joking about the virus. A year later, I had the opportunity to tell my story to Peter Scharff who was interviewing the event industry. In my opinion, the hardest hit industry in 2020. We were the first to see lost business and it will be the slowest to come back to normal, but I’m expecting a huge influx in 2022!

Peter Scharff is a portrait photographer and a collector of stories told to him by the people he photographs. Recently, his first collection of photographs and stories became a book, “Facing Parkinson’s”, based on the interviews he conducted while photographing people, who like Peter, are facing the challenges of Parkinson’s Disease. If you would like to find out more about “Facing Parkinson’s” or purchase a copy of the book please go to www.facingparkinsons.com.

His next portrait project was just getting started when the Coronavirus pandemic forced all of us to retreat from our normal lives.  Peter’s way of dealing with the challenges of isolation has been to continue to reach out and do portraits & collect stories via FaceTime and Zoom. He records the audio and do the portraits by actually photographing the screen.

Connecting virtually is a partial replacement for real human contact as is doing portraits over Zoom. If you would like to learn more, visit his website at https://www.portraits-stories.com/about

My Story…

KELLI P.

I really started putting my focus on event photography and 2020 was going to be my first year that I was doing events only. Then my business went down to zero. I had to get a roommate and I filed for unemployment. I got a PPP loan and then just picked up a couple of part-time gigs with some friends, you know, admin work to fill in. The last time I shot an event was early March, 2020. I miss doing what I feel like I was good at. When I tell people I'm a photographer it really makes me feel confident and proud of what I do. I feel like I am who I am because of what I've been doing the past five years. I started dating someone during COVID and he has never seen me working full time. And I think my personal fear is that he'll never know me as an event photographer, seeing what I'm passionate about and what I'm good at. I think that's one of the things I've been struggling with. So being isolated, being able to be home and have home cooked meals and binge watch TV, a slower pace, has been nice for the most part. But then I miss the excitement. I miss the travel. I miss the nice hotels. I miss the yummy food.