How to Photograph and Film Simultaneously Without Losing Your Mind
The idea of capturing photo and video at the same time sounds efficient until you are standing on a riverbank at six in the morning with a water housing around your neck, a drone case at your feet, a gimbal on a tripod behind you, and two pieces of talent in kayaks waiting for the light to hit just right. Then it sounds like a lot.
Multi-format production is one of the most valuable skills a commercial photographer can develop. Brands increasingly need content across every platform simultaneously and the photographer who can deliver a coherent library of stills, video, and UGC from a single production is solving a real problem that most production companies cannot solve as efficiently. The Oru Kayak Lake campaign produced over two hundred images, three long form videos, more than two hours of UGC footage, and twenty vertical video ads across five days. You can see the full results here: Oru Kayak Lake Campaign.
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Start With a Clear Priority Hierarchy
The biggest mistake photographers make when producing multiple formats is treating every format as equally urgent at every moment. Photo and video compete for attention and when both are pulling equally hard, neither gets what it needs. The result is a day where you feel like you worked hard and come home with less than you expected across every format.
The fix is a clear hierarchy established before the day begins. On the Oru Kayak campaign, the priority order was product shots and hero stills first, video second, UGC third. In the golden hour windows at sunrise and sunset, the priority was unambiguous. Get the hero photography locked before anything else moves. Once the hero stills were in the bag, attention shifted fully to video. The gimbal came out, the drone went up, the camera switched to video mode, and the talent knew the energy of the production was changing.
This sounds simple but requires real discipline in the moment. When the light is doing something extraordinary and you can see a video frame that would be incredible, the temptation is to stay on video and chase it. But if the hero stills are not locked yet, chasing the video frame means going home without the primary deliverable. The hierarchy protects you from that decision in the exact moments when it is hardest to make correctly.
Build the hierarchy before you get to set. Know exactly what the priority order is and communicate it clearly to every member of your crew and your talent. When everyone understands what matters most at any given moment, decisions become faster and the day runs with less friction.
Use Your Gear as a Second Shooter
One of the most effective tools on the Oru Kayak campaign was the DJI gimbal used as a second shooter. While the primary camera was capturing stills or handheld video from one angle, the gimbal was positioned to capture a completely different angle simultaneously. It did not require a dedicated operator. It was set up, framed, and left to run while the production moved around it.
This approach multiplies your coverage without multiplying your crew. A two-person crew can effectively produce the coverage of a three or four person crew if the gear is positioned thoughtfully and left to capture while the humans work other angles. The drone operates the same way. Once in the air and positioned, it is generating aerials autonomously while the ground crew focuses on surface-level content. You are not choosing between the drone shot and the ground shot. You are getting both at the same time.
The key to making this work is setup time built into the schedule. Both the gimbal and the drone require time to position correctly before the moment you need them. If the hero moment is a sunrise paddle at 6:30 AM, the gimbal should be in position by 6:00. The drone should be in the air and positioned by 6:15. The photographer should be in the water with the housing by 6:20. When the light hits at 6:30, everything is already running and the only job is to stay present and responsive to what the moment offers.
The moments that produce the best integrated content are almost never the ones where you scrambled to get everything set up at the last minute. They are the ones where everything was ready before the moment arrived and the production could simply exist inside it rather than chasing it.
Building UGC Into a Professional Production
The UGC content on the Oru Kayak campaign was captured on phones intentionally. Not because phones were the best tool available but because the phone aesthetic matched the UGC purpose. Authentic, spontaneous, the kind of content a real person on a real road trip would actually capture. Polishing it with professional camera footage would have undermined the entire point.
The way UGC was integrated into the production was straightforward. Once the primary camera work for any given setup was complete, the phones came out and everyone captured whatever felt natural. The talent used their phones. The photographer used a phone. Nobody was performing for the camera. The brief was simple: treat it like you are actually on a road trip and capture what you would actually capture. Laughing while loading the kayak into the van. A quick clip of the water before getting in. The view from inside the cockpit looking back toward shore.
That permission to be unscripted produced content that no amount of direction could have manufactured. The playfulness that came through in the best UGC clips was real because nobody was trying to make it look real. The production had already created genuine moments through five days of actually doing the road trip. The phones just captured the edges of those moments that the primary camera was not covering.
UGC does not need to be a separate production or a separate creative brief. It lives naturally at the edges of a production built around real experience. If the production is genuinely doing the thing rather than performing the thing, the UGC captures itself. The only thing required is permission and the willingness to put down the professional camera long enough for it to happen.
The Daily Schedule That Generated the Volume
The five production days on the Oru Kayak campaign each followed the same basic structure. Setup and arrival at the location before sunrise, typically around 6:00 AM with a 4:00 AM wake-up. First production window from sunrise through approximately 11:00 AM, covering the morning light. Midday break for lunch, review, and location move of thirty minutes to an hour. Afternoon production window starting approximately two hours before sunset and running through last light. Backup to drives, dinner, and review before sleep.
That structure produced two high-quality production windows every day. Early fall light in the Eastern Sierra and Lake Tahoe region is exceptional in both morning and evening. The midday light is harsh and unflattering for the kind of lifestyle and product content the campaign needed. Using the midday window for movement and review rather than forcing frames in bad light was a deliberate decision that protected the quality of everything captured in the golden hour windows.
The review sessions during the midday break were not optional. Watching the previous session's footage and culling the morning's selects while traveling to the next location kept post-production manageable rather than arriving home with a week of unreviewed material to sort through. It also informed the afternoon session by making clear what had already been captured and what was still needed before the day ended. Knowing you have the hero still from the morning allows you to use the afternoon for video and UGC without the pressure of still needing the primary deliverable.
Managing Energy Across Five Consecutive Days
Five days of multi-format production in early fall conditions is physically and mentally demanding in ways that are easy to underestimate during planning. The schedule ran from pre-dawn setup through sunset with location moves in between. Loading and unloading kayaks, camera cases, drone equipment, and housing gear multiple times per day in varying conditions adds up faster than expected.
By day three of the Oru Kayak campaign, the crew was feeling it. The talent was feeling it. The gap between the energy needed to produce excellent content and the energy available to produce it was narrowing. Managing that gap is a skill that only develops through experience and the campaign was an important lesson in it.
The most effective energy management tool is leading by example. If the production requires getting in cold water to get the frame, get in the cold water first. If the morning requires being on location before sunrise, be there before anyone else. On one particularly demanding morning during the Oru Kayak campaign, starting the day with a cold plunge before the cameras came out reset the energy of the entire set. It was a signal: this is hard and we are doing it anyway because this is worth doing. That kind of leadership from the photographer-director carries a crew through the moments when the warmth of a van and another hour of sleep sounds more appealing than another pre-dawn setup.
Post-Production for High Volume Output
Multi-format productions create post-production challenges that single-format work does not. The volume of material is significantly higher. The organizational demands are more complex. The editing decisions are more numerous. And the risk of getting lost in the material is real enough that many photographers underestimate it during the planning phase.
The Oru Kayak post-production was handled with an editing team rather than solo. That decision, made possible by the expanded budget, was one of the most important calls of the entire project. Having an editor who could take the creative direction and execute against it meant staying in a creative director role rather than getting buried in the technical work of assembling cuts and culling thousands of frames.
The UGC was delivered raw and organized by day and location. The client received the full library and worked with their internal team to cut it into ads and social content. The long form videos were fully edited and delivered as completed pieces. The stills were culled and delivered in two rounds: selects first for approval, then finals after feedback. Building that delivery structure before the production starts rather than figuring it out afterward saves an enormous amount of time and prevents the disorganization that kills momentum in post. Know what you are delivering, in what format, on what timeline, before a single frame is captured.
Why Small Productions Demand Higher Creative Standards
One of the counterintuitive realities of small crew production is that it demands higher creative standards from the photographer-director, not lower ones. On a large production, individual decisions can be course-corrected by the collective judgment of a team. On a small production, every decision about what to capture, when to move, when to push through, and when to let a setup go lives entirely with the photographer. There is no safety net of second opinions happening in real time.
That responsibility sharpens creative decision-making in ways that large productions do not. When every frame counts toward the deliverable because there is no B-unit capturing coverage while you work the primary angle, you develop a more precise instinct for what is worth pursuing and what is not. You become faster at reading light. Faster at recognizing when the talent is genuinely present versus performing. Faster at knowing when a setup has given you what it has to give and it is time to move. Those instincts compound over time and they are what make small crew production increasingly efficient and increasingly excellent with experience.
The Oru Kayak campaign was the kind of production that builds those instincts. Five consecutive days of high-stakes multi-format production with no margin for error on any deliverable category, in locations that could not be revisited if something was missed. Every decision mattered and having made those decisions across a week of real production is worth more than any amount of theoretical preparation for the next one.
Book a discovery call to talk about what a multi-format production could look like for your brand: dalton-johnson.com.
- Do you have a clear priority hierarchy for when photo and video compete for your attention on a multi-format production day?
- How are you currently using your gear as a second shooter, and is there equipment in your kit that could be generating coverage while you work a different angle?
- What does your current approach to UGC look like on professional productions, and are you giving talent genuine permission to be unscripted?
- How do you manage crew and talent energy across multiple consecutive production days, and what is your system for leading by example when conditions are demanding?
Dalton Johnson is a professional adventure photographer, filmmaker, and director with over a decade of experience creating campaigns 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.