Oluchi Eze

“Hi my name is Oluchi

 

I am a creative portrait and events photographer and community builder. I host photo meetups around Ottawa.

Mostly they’ve been around the Centretown area.

 

The reason I host photo meetups is I have so many ideas in my brain and I can’t execute them all. And I feel like there’s something beautiful about sharing ideas with people. And then why not even just add a little extra step in bringing people together?

 

So even the fact that we get to borrow and use professional lighting from Henry’s, the fact that people can just bring their cameras, they get to finally use them in a more creative space, very low pressure.

 

The goal is just creativity, an excuse to come on a weeknight or a weekend and just bring your camera or just model and like to wear the outfit that’s been in your closet that you just didn’t have a place to wear.

 

The goal is just to have fun.

 

For the past year, I’ve been doing photo meetups and it finally got recognized. I didn’t expect that to be honest.

 

Arts Ottawa had their first awards this past year, and I won the Youth Arts Award for 2026. And it’s because of my community work with these photo meetups and creating spaces for photographers and models and creatives just to have fun and be a little weird and just kind of like let loose in a very respectful way.

 

So I won’t lie, one of the things that inspires me, there’s  different meetups beyond Ottawa that inspire me. One is the Socality meetups that are usually sponsored by Canon and it happens around Canada, but they never come to Ottawa. It is actually one of the reasons why this I started these because I kept harping on them like they would go to Toronto, they would go to Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, but they would never come to Ottawa and I would always be in their comment sections like come to Ottawa, come to Ottawa, there’s literally I know like a good 20 people that would at least go to this and they never would.

 

So I was like, you know what? I’ll host my own.  I’ve never been one to like to wait until someone does it. I usually just do it.

 

So I started my own photo meetups here and I worked with my friend Kanae before she moved to Japan.

 

So now it’s just kind of been me doing the photo meetups and bringing it to Ottawa and I’m trying to bring the space here.”