How to Make Your Photography Work Across Multiple Formats From One Shoot

Every commercial shoot contains far more usable content than most photographers extract from it. A week of shooting in Northern California produced, in the case of the Rivian project, enough material for a full press photography package, a longform written article, a multi-week social media campaign, and over a million organic views across all three formats combined. The raw material for all of that came from one trip with one vehicle and one photographer.

The difference between a shoot that produces one deliverable and a shoot that produces an entire campaign is not the amount of time you spend on location or the size of the production budget. It is the intentionality you bring to capturing across formats before you arrive, and the systems you use to release content across platforms after you return. Read the full Rivian case study here to see exactly how this played out in practice.

Understand the Format Requirements Before You Leave

Each content format has specific technical and aesthetic requirements that affect how you capture on location. Professional press photography needs high resolution, controlled composition, and images that will hold up at print scale. Social media content performs best when it feels immediate, authentic, and native to the platform. Editorial images for a longform article need to work at web scale, complement the text, and carry specific narrative functions rather than just illustrating general themes.

Understanding those requirements before you leave means you are capturing for each format intentionally rather than hoping the images you make for one format will happen to work for the others. On the Rivian project, I had a clear picture of all three format requirements before the trip started. That picture changed what I captured on each day of the shoot — not in a way that made the work feel mechanical, but in a way that made sure I came home with a complete library rather than a strong set for one format and gaps in the others.

The most common gap photographers leave in a multi-format shoot is the vertical. Professional photography defaults to horizontal framing because it works for print, web, and editorial contexts. But social media, particularly Instagram Stories and TikTok, performs overwhelmingly in vertical format. If you capture only horizontal on location, you have no vertical assets for social — which means either cropping horizontal images awkwardly or going back to location for additional capture. Building vertical capture into the shot list from the beginning eliminates that problem before it starts.

Build a Shot List That Addresses All Three Visual Languages

Different content formats require different visual languages, not just different technical specifications. Press photography speaks in authoritative wide shots and clean product images. Editorial photography speaks in documentary detail, human moments, and specific textures. Social content speaks in immediacy, imperfection, and the feeling of being present rather than observing.

A shot list that addresses all three visual languages will look different from a standard photography shot list. It will include the obvious hero shots, yes — the vehicle in the dramatic landscape, the iconic location at golden hour. But it will also include the detail shots that make an article feel grounded in a specific place, the candid moments that make social content feel authentic, and the transitional images — the movement, the arrival, the departure — that give a campaign narrative structure across platforms.

On the Rivian project, my mental shot list was organized into three categories from the first day of the trip: campaign-level images that would anchor the press package, story-level images that would carry the narrative of the article, and moment-level images that would perform on social. I was not always capturing for all three categories simultaneously, but I was always aware of which category a given moment most naturally served and what I still needed to cover in the others.

Capture Behind the Scenes From Day One, Not as an Afterthought

Behind-the-scenes content — the raw, handheld, iPhone-quality footage that performs as UGC on social platforms — is almost always the last thing photographers think about on commercial shoots and the first thing clients wish they had more of. The professional work gets captured because it was planned. The behind-the-scenes content gets missed because it was not.

Building behind-the-scenes capture into the first day of every shoot rather than treating it as an afterthought changes what you come home with. Not just in quantity — in quality. The most compelling behind-the-scenes content happens early in a project, when everything is new and the genuine reactions and discoveries are still fresh. By day three of a shoot, you have adapted to the environment, the surprises are fewer, and the authentic reactions that make behind-the-scenes content compelling are harder to come by.

On the Rivian project, I was capturing iPhone footage from the moment we loaded the vehicle on the first morning. The early clips — the departure, the first stretch of the drive, the first discovery of fall color around a bend in the road — ended up being some of the most compelling UGC content of the whole trip precisely because the genuine reactions in them could not have been staged or recreated on a later day.

Create the Variety That Each Platform Needs

Each distribution platform has different content needs, and a shoot that serves all of them requires deliberate variety in what you capture. A press package needs a range of shots that work across different layout and sizing contexts — wide establishing shots, medium lifestyle shots, tight detail shots. An editorial package needs images that can work as article headers, in-body illustrations at different sizes, and standalone visual moments. A social package needs a mix of vertical and horizontal content across multiple visual moods — dramatic hero shots for the feed, authentic candid moments for Stories, motion-oriented clips for Reels and TikTok.

The mistake most photographers make is capturing excellent images for one context and then trying to adapt them for all the others. Excellent horizontal landscape photography is not excellent vertical social content. Excellent clean product photography is not excellent editorial documentation. Adapting images across contexts almost always produces something that is acceptable rather than excellent, because each context was designed for different types of visual content.

Capturing deliberately for each platform produces content that is excellent in its native context rather than acceptable in all of them. The additional capture required to cover all three format types is not as significant as it sounds in practice — many of the same locations and moments produce good material for all three contexts if you are capturing across them intentionally. The difference is not how much time you spend on location. It is how much intentionality you bring to how you use that time.

Notes and Voice Memos Are Content Too

If you are planning to produce written content alongside photography, the notes and voice memos you capture on location are as important as the images. They are the raw material from which the article will be built, and the specific details they contain — the exact color of the light, the name on the sign at the roadside stop, the specific conversation that happened at a gas station in a small town — cannot be reconstructed from memory weeks after the fact.

I keep a running voice memo on my phone throughout every day of a multi-format shoot. Not a formal journal — just a stream of observations, reactions, and specific details I do not want to lose. The voice memo from the morning the vehicle updated itself — the frustration, the dark road, the slow crawl back to the hotel — became the raw material for one of the most compelling sections of the Rivian article. That material would not have existed in usable form if I had relied on memory instead of capturing it in the moment.

The discipline of noting specific details in real time is the same discipline that makes photography work across formats — intentional capture rather than relying on whatever you happen to remember afterward. Apply it to language the same way you apply it to image-making and your written content will be significantly stronger as a result.

Plan the Release Before You Leave, Not After You Return

The release strategy for a multi-format shoot is most effective when it is planned before the shoot starts rather than developed from whatever content you happen to return with. Pre-planning the release means knowing, before you leave, which content will anchor the campaign launch, which content will extend the campaign's social presence over the following weeks, and which content will serve as evergreen material that continues generating traffic long after the initial launch.

On the Rivian project, the release plan looked roughly like this: the professional photography and written article would launch simultaneously, with the article placed in a digital publication and the photography distributed through press channels. The UGC social clips would be released in a staggered sequence over the following weeks, each one driving traffic back to the article. The professional images would continue circulating through press and earned media channels independently of the social release.

That staggered release extended the campaign's active presence from a single launch day to several weeks of ongoing social activity, which is what pushed the total view count past a million without any paid promotion. None of that would have been possible if the release strategy had been developed after the fact from whatever content happened to exist — because the content that existed was planned around that release strategy from the beginning.

The Economic Case for Multi-Format Shooting

From a business perspective, the case for shooting across multiple formats on every commercial project is straightforward: the cost of additional capture on location is low, and the value of the additional deliverables is high. A single shoot day produces raw material that, captured intentionally, can generate press assets, editorial content, and a weeks-long social campaign. All of that value comes from time that was already being spent on location.

The alternative — separate shoots for each format — costs multiples more in time, logistics, and client resources. Separate location trips, separate equipment setups, separate creative briefs and coordination conversations. For a client managing a campaign budget, the single-shoot, multi-format approach is almost always more economically efficient than the specialist-per-format alternative.

Communicating that efficiency to clients during the briefing process is part of how you position the value of a multi-skill approach. Not "I can do more things" but "I can give you everything you need for a complete campaign from a single production week, which costs significantly less than coordinating three separate productions." That framing makes the value concrete and the alternative more expensive-sounding, which is exactly the framing that wins briefs and justifies the rates that multi-format shooting commands.

Building This Into Your Standard Practice

Multi-format shooting becomes standard practice when you build it into your pre-shoot process as a checklist rather than a creative consideration. Before every shoot, run through the same questions: What formats does this campaign need? What does each format require technically and aesthetically? What behind-the-scenes content is most likely to perform, and when in the shoot is it most likely to be available? What notes and voice memos do I need to capture to support the written content?

Those questions, asked consistently before every project, produce a preparation process that makes multi-format capture automatic rather than effortful. The first few projects where you apply this process will feel more demanding than a single-format shoot. By the fifth or sixth project, it will feel like the natural way to approach any commercial assignment, and you will be consistently delivering more value from the same amount of time on location than you were delivering before.

That increased value per production day is what justifies higher rates, longer-term client relationships, and briefs that grow in scope over time. It is not a theoretical benefit — it is the direct result of using the time you already spend on location more intentionally. The shoot is going to happen regardless. The only question is whether you come home with one deliverable or a campaign. The photographers who consistently come home with a campaign are the ones clients call first for the next brief, because the experience of working with them is categorically different from the experience of working with someone who delivers images and disappears. That difference compounds into the most valuable thing in commercial photography: a reputation for producing outcomes rather than deliverables.

Communicating Multi-Format Value to Clients Who Have Not Experienced It

Most clients have not worked with a photographer who captures across multiple formats intentionally. Their experience of commercial photography is a single deliverable — a gallery, a video, a set of social assets — produced by a specialist who was hired for that specific format. Introducing multi-format shooting as a concept requires explaining not just what it is but what it produces that single-format shooting does not.

The most effective way to communicate that value is through a case study that shows the full campaign rather than describing it in abstract terms. The Rivian project produced professional photography, a placed editorial article, and a multi-week social UGC campaign from a single week of production. Showing that complete campaign to a prospective client — the images, the article, the social clips, and the million-plus view result — communicates what multi-format shooting delivers more effectively than any amount of description could.

Build one case study that shows the complete multi-format output from a single project and you have the most powerful sales tool available for attracting clients who want campaign outcomes rather than image deliverables. That case study does the explaining that you otherwise have to do in every briefing conversation. It shows exactly what the approach produces, in concrete and verifiable terms, before any conversation about rate or scope has taken place. The client who reads it either wants what it shows or they do not — and the ones who want it are the ones worth working with.

To see exactly how multi-format shooting played out across a single week-long road trip project, read the complete Rivian case study here.

1. On your last commercial shoot, how many different content formats did you capture for? How many formats did the client end up needing?
2. What would your standard pre-shoot checklist look like if it included questions about every format the campaign would require?
3. Have you ever had to go back to location for additional capture because you did not plan for a specific format during the original shoot? What would have prevented that?
4. How do you currently communicate the value of multi-format shooting to clients? Is there a more compelling way to frame it in economic terms?

Dalton Johnson is a professional adventure and editorial photographer with over a decade of experience creating images on all seven continents. His client work includes Patagonia, GoPro, Arc'teryx, Four Seasons, Nike, Rivian, Big Agnes, Ford Bronco, and 160+ other brands. He runs Dalton Johnson Media as a full-service studio, from pre-production through post and distribution.