I Built a Photography Business While Everything Was Falling Apart

My first wedding was three days after Arizona declared a public-health emergency. Naturally, I decided this was an excellent time to build a career.

On March 14, 2020, I walked into my first wedding as a photographer carrying camera gear, a very inexpensive contract, and the quiet understanding that I could not mess this up.

The bride was a friend and fellow lacrosse coach. She had trusted me with her wedding because I wanted the experience and was willing to work for what I will lovingly describe as “portfolio-building prices.” The ceremony was in Mesa, Arizona, and I arrived with a second shooter and all the familiar nerves of doing something important for the first time.

But the air around the wedding held another kind of nervousness too. Something larger was moving toward us, though none of us yet understood its shape.

Earlier that month, I had filmed an international business event in Sedona. Only about half the expected attendees arrived. Flights were being canceled, and the people who had made it to Arizona talked about locked-down cities back home. Some were relieved to have gotten out. Others were unsure whether they could get back.

I listened to stories from countries that felt very far away while standing among Sedona’s red rocks, where the sun still rose on schedule and tourists still wandered through hotel lobbies. Intellectually, I understood that something serious was happening. Emotionally, it still seemed to belong somewhere else.

Three days before the wedding, Arizona declared a public-health emergency.

On the wedding day, my second shooter and I stood near our equipment and looked at each other.

“Should we be wearing masks right now?” one of us asked.

We considered this with all the medical expertise available to two photographers on March 14, 2020, and decided we were probably fine.

That sentence has aged beautifully.

Several members of the bride’s family and friends from New Jersey could not attend because their flights had been canceled. Their absence was noticeable, but so was the determination of everyone who had made it. The couple still got married. People still laughed. Dresses needed bustling, flowers needed carrying, and someone was always looking for someone who had disappeared moments before family portraits.

I photographed the ceremony, the embraces, and the glances people exchange when they believe the camera is pointed somewhere else. The wedding was beautiful. For a few hours, celebration held the center of the frame.

Outside it, the world was changing by the day.

The next morning, March 15, Arizona announced statewide school closures. By March 16, Mesa had closed libraries, recreation programs, museums, and arts venues. On March 19, restaurant dining rooms, bars, gyms, and theaters faced restrictions in affected counties. The statewide stay-home order followed at the end of the month.

Arizona did not shut down with one dramatic slam. Normal life disappeared the way light leaves a room at sunset: gradually, and then all at once.

I had photographed my first wedding at the exact edge of the before and after.

Behind the Brave Face

If this were a tidy entrepreneurial origin story, I would tell you I returned home from that wedding, identified a disruption in the market, and developed an innovative service offering.

That is technically what happened. It is also a deeply annoying way to describe it.

I was newly separated and heading toward divorce. I had been a stay-at-home mom for several years, and I needed to make money. My son Jack was three. My daughter Molly was in first grade, which now meant school happened at home through a screen, with me serving as teacher, technology department, snack provider, focus coach, and the person asking for the seventeenth time whether the assignment was actually submitted.

I edited during whatever fragments of quiet I could find. I looked for work. I answered clients. I learned the business side of being creative, which is mostly discovering that taking the photographs is only one small part of having a photography business.

Because Arizona still allowed certain outdoor work, I photographed anything I safely could: families, graduates, couples, retreats, businesses, outdoor brands, and the stars. I even created campaign work for Klymit, a camping and outdoor-equipment company. Artistically versatile. Financially terrified. Sometimes those look remarkably similar on Instagram.

There were a lot of tears in those months, mostly where nobody could see them.

From the outside, I looked productive. I posted photographs. I showed up for clients. I kept my children’s days moving. People who knew me had no idea that behind closed doors I was calculating exactly how much money needed to land in my bank account for us to be okay.

I gave myself one number: $250.

If I could make $250 that day, I could keep food on the table. I could pay what needed paying. I could breathe for another twenty-four hours.

This was not a revenue goal selected during a quarterly planning retreat. There was no embossed notebook, no color-coded projection, no tiny bottle of champagne waiting beneath a vision board.

Two hundred and fifty dollars meant survival.

A Very Glamorous Bedroom Studio

While photographers watched weddings disappear from their calendars, couples were trying to decide what marriage looked like without a room full of people. They still wanted to say their vows. Their parents still wanted to see them do it. Grandparents, siblings, and best friends were suddenly reduced to names on a guest list and faces on a screen.

I could not fix the pandemic. I thought I might be able to fix that part.

So I taught myself how to livestream.

I watched YouTube tutorials late into the day, paused them, rewound them, read blogs that assumed I understood words I had only learned three minutes earlier, and ordered equipment from Amazon. When the boxes arrived, I spread cameras, adapters, cords, and various small black objects across my bedroom and began testing.

Sometimes the camera connected. Sometimes the computer recognized it. Sometimes sound and video arrived together, which felt frankly greedy. I learned through repetition, minor failures, and the universal technical strategy of unplugging something and plugging it back in with more authority.

Nothing says “future business empire” quite like sitting on the bedroom floor beneath a nest of cables while a man on YouTube explains bitrate.

Eventually, the picture appeared where it was supposed to. The sound followed. I repeated the process until success felt less like an accident.

Then I built livestreaming into my wedding packages at no additional cost. Couples would receive their highlight film and full ceremony video, while the people who could not attend could watch the ceremony as it happened.

I pushed the offer hard because it solved something real. This was not an upgrade invented to make a package sound more expensive. It was a bridge into a room people were heartbroken to miss.

The iMac Goes to Sedona

Before I trusted myself with a wedding, I livestreamed business retreats. My first major test was a two-day entrepreneurship event at Enchantment Resort in Sedona, with successful business owners gathered in the room and more joining online.

Enchantment sits inside Boynton Canyon, where red-rock walls rise around the property and make almost any professional undertaking look more established than it feels. I arrived with two camera bodies, two wide lenses, limited gear, limited knowledge, and my entire desktop iMac.

Not an iPad. Not a laptop.

The whole desktop computer.

I did not yet own a laptop powerful enough for the job. That was a logistical concern for Future Shannon. Present Shannon had promised a livestream and apparently believed portability was a limiting mindset.

I carried the computer in, arranged cameras that could not zoom nearly as far as I wanted, connected the cables, and tried to look like this was precisely how professionals did it. Inside, I was monitoring every piece of equipment like it might suddenly develop free will.

The broadcast went live.

It stayed live.

The people online could see and hear the speakers. The cameras recorded. The computer survived. I balanced two days of filming and streaming without broadcasting the ceiling, losing the event, or setting fire to a power strip.

When I was paid, I used part of that money to buy a laptop.

That purchase was not glamorous either, but it changed what I could do. One job bought the tool that made the next job possible. The business was beginning to build itself in small, practical increments.

Seventeen Thousand Cables and a Wedding

My first wedding livestream was at the Japanese Friendship Garden in Phoenix, a quiet, green space tucked into the city. It was the sort of setting that looked calm even if the person behind the camera absolutely was not.

I connected my main camera to the new MacBook, set up the YouTube broadcast, checked the audio, checked it again, and arranged what appeared to be seventeen thousand cables between me and professional humiliation.

I worried about the internet. I worried about the sound. I worried about the computer freezing, the camera disconnecting, the stream dropping, and one tiny adapter deciding at the last second that it no longer supported love.

Then the ceremony began, and there was no more time to worry.

The couple stood together in the garden. Their guests watched from wherever the pandemic had left them. A camera signal traveled through my laptop and out into the world, carrying a moment that would otherwise have belonged only to the handful of people physically present.

It worked.

Not theoretically. Not in my bedroom. Not because a tutorial said it should.

It worked when it mattered.

The couple had their film. Their families had the ceremony. And I had the first real evidence that perhaps I could build something from this strange combination of cameras, problem-solving, and refusal to panic in public.

Confidence Is a Receipt

Over the following year to year and a half, I booked roughly six or seven weddings. To an established studio, that number might sound modest. To me, it was enormous. Wedding work paid more than individual portrait sessions, and the livestream made my packages genuinely valuable at a time when couples needed new answers.

I kept photographing retreats, businesses, families, graduates, couples, and the Milky Way. The smaller jobs kept us moving. The weddings gave the business room to grow.

With every job, I learned something. With every payment, I could improve something. A retreat bought a laptop. A wedding paid bills. Experience sharpened the work, and the work created more experience.

We tend to talk about confidence as if it arrives first, dressed for the occasion, and escorts us into difficult things.

Mine was consistently late.

I did the frightening thing, discovered I had survived it, and filed that evidence away. I learned unfamiliar technology because I had to. I cared for clients under pressure because they needed me to. I kept working while my personal life was painful because my children were watching me build their safety in real time.

Confidence did not create the work.

The work created confidence.

What Calm Felt Like

Survival did not turn into stability with a viral post, a giant check, or a perfectly timed montage of me closing my laptop beside an expensive latte.

It accumulated quietly.

One booking. One delivery. One reinvested payment. One day reaching $250, then another. A little more experience. A little less fear. Enough work to travel sometimes. Enough consistency to stop treating every bill like an approaching weather system.

In 2023, I moved into an apartment in Sedona.

I remember entering that space and feeling something I had not felt in a long time: calm.

It felt like home. It also felt exciting, but the excitement was different from the frantic energy that had powered the previous years. This was not the adrenaline of figuring out how to survive another day. It was the quiet realization that I could afford the place where I was standing.

The business was working. I had traveled. My children were okay. I was okay.

I stood inside the life I had built and thought, I’ve got this.

Not forever. Not flawlessly. Life does not offer that particular package.

But I had carried us here.

Maybe It Was a Little Bit of Everything

Looking backward, I can make the story sound strategic. I recognized an urgent need, created a differentiated offer, diversified my services, and reinvested revenue into equipment.

All of that is true.

It is also true that I cried behind closed doors, learned from strangers on YouTube, bought gear I barely understood, dragged a desktop computer into a luxury resort, and worked constantly because two little people needed me to find a way forward.

Maybe the business survived because I was adaptable. Maybe it was persistence, timing, talent, luck, or the willingness to solve a real problem while everyone else was overwhelmed.

Maybe it was love.

There is a particular kind of drive that appears when success stops being about impressing anyone. It becomes about caring for the people you love. Speaking for yourself. Refusing to disappear from your own life, even when that life bears almost no resemblance to the one you planned.

Most likely, it was a little bit of everything.

I did not know any of that while I was living it. I only knew what needed to happen next.

So I did the work in front of me.

One day, three years later, I looked around an apartment in Sedona and realized that somewhere between the bedroom cables and the brave face, survival had quietly become a life.