January 30th marked the official launch event for the Birmingham Enterprise Community, a University student-led collaborative project with a focus on developing enterprise skills and collaborative links between student bodies, featuring participation from five Universities from the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Region. (Aston University, Birmingham City University, Newman University, University College Birmingham and University of Birmingham).

I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to shoot the event after getting in touch with one of the organiser's Daniel who was also a speaker at the event which aimed to initiate the conversations between students from the 5 universities as well as expose this collective to policymakers and business figures within our region.

Having worked on it since June 2018 it must have been a relief to everyone involved to get the launch off the ground and to gather such an impressive series of speakers including James Eder (Student Bean founder), Andy Street (Mayor of West Midlands), Emma Jones (Enterprise Nation founder) and Yanting Zuo (Talent Trending).

The night started with registration, light networking, pizza (of course) and a short welcome from Mohammed Ali…not the boxer.

One thing that struck me immediately was the nice variety of students, business people and academics in the room. I tried to capture this variety along with the discussions they had with each other and the emotions/actions during each speakers sessions. Here are a few of my favourites of the crowd from the 400+ shots I took at the event.

The other thing that struck me at the event and that I feel I captured effectively is the passion that the speakers showed in each of their talks, helping to encourage the young generation of minds in the crowd to go out and be their spectacular entrepreneurial selves.

It honestly took a lot at times to concentrate on capturing the shots and not purely on the knowledge that was being provided from James, Andy, Emma and Yanting after a rousing speech by Daniel.

Post event I brought everything together quite quickly so that I could get the finished edits back to Birmingham Enterprise Community within 48 hours of the event as I knew this would be a key period for them in getting messages of their event out while it was still fresh in the minds of the audience.

Thankfully they liked the shots as much as I loved taking them and were quick to use them across their various channels. Now I’m looking forward to seeing what their next big event is and how those involved in the Birmingham Enterprise Community take the energy from this event into their various ventures.

You can follow their progress on twitter and Facebook.

If you’re in the process of putting together an event and could use a photographer, get in touch and let’s discuss how I could help capture the event for you.