Hi! I’m Shannon. If you’re new here, I have spent the past ten years as a maternity and newborn photographer in Phoenix. I could have never dreamed my business would take me where it has. It’s been a really bumpy road of highs and lows, but gosh it’s everything I could have ever wanted.

Who is Shannon Burke Photography?

I would love to tell you about me, and my past ten years as a maternity and newborn photographer in Phoenix. First and foremost, I’m a wife and mother. I’ve been with my husband for 15 years now, and much like owning a business we’ve slowly built our little empire. We have four kids together, and they are our little built in best friends. Obviously I’m a huge fan of babies, hence the business, but watching little humans you created turn into young adults is the most rewarding part of life. We’re no longer in the little kid phase of life, our kids range from 18 to 8 and it truly is amazing doing life with all of them.

How I got here.

Owning my own business was never apart of the plan. I never went to school for it, and I definitely never had any interest in it, but here we are! I graduated high school as a junior at 16, went to college to get my pre-reqs for nursing school and met my husband along the way. We met when I was 18, got engaged 6 months later, got pregnant with my first at 19, had him at 20, and we got married 6 months later. We lost a few babies along our journey, and got pregnant at 22 with our rainbow baby. Which just happened to be right when I got accepted to nursing school. Instead of tackling nursing school while pregnant, I decided to defer my acceptance and wait until after my daughter was born. I’m sure you can guess what happened from there!

Once she was born, I still wasn’t ready to go back to school and since I always had an interest in photography, I decided to pursue it. My husband bought me a camera for Christmas, and Shannon Burke Photography was born. There’s two things I learned from this chunk of time in my life, the first one being if we ever left Arizona I would never start another business, and I would absolutely never start another business with two kids under two.

The amount of time and effort it takes to get a business off the ground, aside from my family, I’ve truly never worked at anything harder. Especially with toddlers, like have you ever tried to focus on anything with toddlers around? Zero stars, lol

Why maternity and newborn photography?

It’s always been babies for me. Since I was little I’ve loved babies, and I was actually planning to go to school to be a labor and delivery nurse, so I knew that I wanted to be around babies. I didn’t know newborn photography was a thing. We didn’t have newborn photography done with any of the older kids, and I regret it so much.

But going into this, I knew it had to be babies, and that’s what it was for probably the first year or so. But, babies come from pregnant moms and I knew it was a smart business move to market as both a maternity and newborn photographer in Phoenix so I could offer bundled packages. Maternity was never really *it* for me when I started, I just wanted the babies. Over the past decade I’ve really fallen in love with both though. The variety I can get from a maternity session, it really fuels my creative outlet.

Anyways, my daughter was four-ish weeks old when I got my first camera, and I’ll spare you the eye sore of her newborn pictures. They’re the typical Pinterest fail style newborn pictures. But I loved it, and I don’t even know why, because I was horrible at it. A year later my niece was born, and she was my first real attempt at a studio newborn session. From there I borrowed anyones newborn to get practice and learn. I’m self taught, which I probably don’t recommend because you could get to your end destination significantly faster by taking workshops. But, I’m stubborn and wanted to figure it out myself. So I did.

Building the business.

Every session I would make notes on what I could do differently, or what I didn’t like, and applied that to every session going forward. It took me a solid five to six years before I felt consistent in my style and producing work that felt like me.

For the first year I worked out of my living room for a short time, and then used my daughter’s bedroom. Shortly after, we bought a house that I was able to transform the dining room into my studio and I stayed there for a couple years until I got my first commercial space. My first space was 400sf and double what I was use to with my home studio. After a year I outgrew that and ended up in my current space, which is still only 800sf. I’ve been here for five years now, and while often enough I wish I could move into something bigger, I’m really big on utilizing what you have. I’ve made a lot of changes to the studio for this year and I can’t wait to share them.

The back end of business.

Like any new business, I had to spend money to make money, and there was a lot of DIY’ing along the way. Some of it paid off, some was a total flop. But I taught myself to crochet, and then to knit so I could make the props I couldn’t afford to buy. I taught myself how to sew to make outfits and bonnets for my sessions, some of the stuff I still use to this day.

I opened a prop shop of newborn outfits and wraps to make more money, to spend on more props. It was a little mini empire but it worked, and I busted my butt to make sure it worked. I eventually closed my prop shop once my photography took off because I didn’t have enough time for both, but since I’ve opened a new shop that’s mostly digital items because we all want immediate access to things. But I still have physical products too, just a manageable amount that I can keep up with.

While building the physical side of the business I also spent a large amount of time learning websites, and how to manage my SEO. Since the beginning I’ve always built my own websites, and managed my SEO. I’ve never outsourced anything with my business because I want to be completely hands on with it. Much like my kids, I’ve built it from the ground up and it means a whole lot to me.

Anyways, I’m really happy you’re here, and I’d love to chat with you about your upcoming session!