How to Write a Story Around Images You Haven't Taken Yet

Most photographers write about images after they take them. The photograph exists, and then the words come after — captions, articles, social posts that describe what the image shows and why it matters. That sequence feels natural because the image is the primary work and the writing is the annotation.

But some of the best photography projects I have worked on started the other way around. The story came first. The images came after. Thinking through the narrative before picking up the camera changed what I shot, how I shot it, and how the final work performed as a campaign. The Rivian case study is the clearest example I have of what writing the story before taking the photographs produces — and the process behind it is something any photographer can learn to use.

Why Pre-Writing Changes What You Shoot

When you think through the story before you arrive on location, you arrive with a different kind of attention. You are not just looking for beautiful or interesting images — you are looking for specific images that serve specific functions in a narrative you have already mapped. That specificity is the most useful thing pre-writing gives you.

On a typical shoot without pre-writing, I respond to what I find. If the light is beautiful at a particular location, I make images there. If something unexpected catches my attention, I document it. The resulting image set is often strong in individual moments but incoherent as a collection — a series of responses to what happened rather than a set of images that tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

On the Rivian project, I had thought through the story before we left. The road trip had an arc: departure from a starting point, travel through fall colors in Yosemite and around Lake Tahoe, stops in small towns along the route, arrival at the Groveland Outpost. Each stage of that arc needed specific types of images. The departure needed establishing shots that set the scale of the journey. The small-town stops needed detail images that grounded the trip in the specific texture of those places. The Groveland arrival needed images that communicated the sense of reaching a destination. Knowing what each stage of the story required meant I was capturing with purpose rather than just responding to whatever was in front of me.

Outline the Story the Way a Writer Would

Pre-writing for a photography project does not mean writing the full article before you take a single photograph. It means outlining the story — identifying the key beats, the emotional arc, the specific moments that the narrative needs to work.

Start with the same question a writer starts with: what is this story about, and what do I want the reader to feel by the end? For the Rivian project, the story was about the experience of taking a sustainable vehicle through landscapes most people associate with long drives in gas-powered cars. The emotional arc was discovery — arriving uncertain whether the vehicle and the infrastructure could handle the trip, and leaving convinced that they could. That emotional arc told me what I needed to photograph: the beginning uncertainty, the beautiful landscapes that made the trip worth taking, and the specific infrastructure moments — the chargers, the outpost — that resolved the uncertainty.

Once you have the emotional arc, work backward to identify the images that produce each stage of it. What photographs make the viewer feel the uncertainty of the beginning? What images carry the beauty and movement of the middle? What specific moment pays off the arc in the end? Each of those questions points toward a specific type of image, often with enough specificity that you can plan where and when to capture it before you ever arrive on location.

Build a Shot List From the Story, Not From the Location

Most photographers build shot lists from the location. They research the place, identify the most photographed viewpoints, and plan to shoot the canonical images of that location — the ones that have worked for other photographers and are likely to work for them.

Building a shot list from the story inverts that process. You start with what the narrative needs and then figure out where you can find it. That shift often leads to less obvious locations and more distinctive images, because you are not looking for the canonical version of the place — you are looking for the version of the place that serves a specific narrative function.

For the Rivian project, the story needed images of small, unusual Northern California towns — the kind of places most people drive through without stopping. A location-first shot list would not have included those places because they are not conventionally photogenic. A story-first shot list included them because those places were essential to the narrative of discovering what lies along a road trip route rather than just driving between famous destinations. Those images ended up being some of the most compelling in the campaign precisely because they were not the images most photographers would have made on the same trip.

Leave Room for the Story to Change

Pre-writing creates a plan, not a script. Some of the most important images from any trip are the ones you did not plan for — the moment that happened unexpectedly and turned out to be exactly what the story needed. The value of pre-writing is not that it eliminates serendipity. It is that it gives you enough structure to recognize when a serendipitous moment is worth capturing and when it is just an interesting distraction.

On the Rivian project, the software update that capped the vehicle at 25 mph during a pre-dawn drive to a sunrise location was not in the story outline. But it was exactly the kind of obstacle-and-recovery moment that makes a road trip narrative compelling. Because I had thought through the story in advance, I recognized immediately that this was a narrative moment worth documenting — not just an inconvenience to manage, but a scene that made the story more honest and more interesting than a trip where everything went perfectly.

The photographs from that morning — the dark road, the slow drive back, the waiting — ended up in the story as evidence that the trip was real rather than a staged production. Pre-writing gave me the framework to recognize what that moment was worth. It did not prevent the unexpected; it helped me respond to the unexpected in ways that served the story.

Write the First Draft of the Article Before You Edit the Images

This is the part of the process that feels most counterintuitive to photographers: write the article before you sit down to edit the images. Not before you take them — after you take them, but before you make selections.

The reason is simple. The article tells you which images the story actually needs. Writing the first draft from your notes and memories of the trip reveals the narrative moments that turned out to matter — and often, those are not the moments that produced the most technically impressive photographs. The image you need for a specific paragraph of the story might be an imperfect, slightly underexposed frame that captures a moment perfectly. The technically excellent image from the same location might not fit anywhere in the story.

Editing images before writing the article leads to selections based on technical quality and visual impact. Editing images after writing the first draft leads to selections based on what the story requires. The second approach consistently produces stronger campaigns because the images and the writing are coherent with each other rather than operating as parallel but unconnected tracks.

Use Your Notes From the Field as Story Seeds

The notes you take during a shoot are the most valuable raw material for the writing process. Not the polished versions of observations — the quick, unedited fragments you captured in the moment, before you had time to smooth them into something presentable.

Before every day of the Rivian trip, I kept a running voice memo on my phone. Not a structured journal — just a stream of observations, reactions, and details I did not want to lose. The exact color of the light through the aspens at a specific spot on the route. The name of the diner in a small town where we stopped for lunch. The conversation I had with someone at a gas station who had never heard of an EV charging outpost in that area.

Those specific details are the difference between writing that feels alive and writing that feels generic. You cannot reconstruct them from memory weeks later. You have to capture them in the moment, knowing you will not use most of them but not yet knowing which ones will turn out to be essential. The notes give you a library of specific details to draw from when you sit down to write. Without them, you are writing from a generalized memory of the trip rather than from the specific texture of the experience.

Match the Writing Tone to the Photography Style

One of the things pre-writing reveals is the tone of the project — and that tone should inform how you photograph as well as how you write. A story about quiet, contemplative landscape photography calls for a different writing voice than a story about the kinetic energy of a road trip. Getting the tone of the writing right before you go on location gives you a reference point for the photographs as well.

On the Rivian project, the tone was exploratory and genuine — the writing voice of someone who was genuinely discovering a route and sharing the experience honestly, including the parts that did not go perfectly. That tone informed the photography. I was not trying to make the trip look more polished or more perfectly planned than it was. I was trying to capture the genuine experience of the road, including its rough edges and unexpected moments. The writing tone and the photography style were calibrated to the same frequency because I had thought through the story before I started shooting.

The Pre-Written Story Becomes the Creative Brief

When you are working with a client or a PR agency, the pre-written story outline serves another purpose: it becomes the creative brief for the collaboration. Rather than arriving on location with only a client's brief to guide you, you arrive with your own narrative framework that you can share with the client and use to align expectations.

On the Rivian project, sharing the story outline with the PR agency before the trip started the collaboration on much stronger footing. They could see exactly how I was planning to frame the experience, which images I was planning to prioritize, and how the written article would connect to the photography. That transparency gave them the opportunity to add input before the shoot rather than after — which is always more efficient and less expensive than changes requested after the images are delivered.

It also signaled a level of intentionality and professionalism that strengthened the client relationship. Coming to a briefing with your own story framework rather than waiting to be told what to do demonstrates that you have thought seriously about the project and are approaching it as a creative partner rather than a technical service provider. That distinction matters in how clients talk about you to other clients.

When to Write the Story First and When to Let It Emerge

Pre-writing works best for projects with a clear narrative arc — road trips, expeditions, event coverage, anything with a journey structure that lends itself to a beginning, middle, and end. It is less necessary for product photography, portrait work, or any shoot where the goal is strong individual images rather than a coherent story across an image set.

The rule of thumb I use is this: if the brief asks for a campaign rather than images, write the story first. If the brief asks for images that will be used independently rather than as a set, respond to what you find on location and write afterward. For the Rivian project, the brief was explicitly asking for a campaign — a road trip story that would run across photography, writing, and social content. That brief called for pre-writing. A product shoot for the Rivian vehicle alone would not have.

Learning to distinguish between those two types of projects, and to apply the right process to each, is part of what makes a photographer more valuable to sophisticated clients. The ones who want campaigns need a collaborator who thinks in stories. The ones who want images need a collaborator who thinks in frames. Knowing which you are dealing with, and shifting your process accordingly, is what separates photographers who grow long-term client relationships from those who stay project-to-project.

Pre-Writing As a Competitive Differentiator

Most photographers arrive on location without having thought through the narrative arc of the work they are about to make. They respond to what they find, they capture what is beautiful or interesting, and they trust that the story will emerge from the edit. That process produces good photography. It rarely produces strong campaigns, because the story that emerges from a reactive process is almost always less coherent than the story that was planned before the first frame was captured.

Photographers who pre-write before they shoot are a small minority. That minority consistently produces stronger campaign work because they arrive on location with a clear sense of what the campaign needs — which images, which moments, which specific details — rather than a general intention to make good photographs. That clarity makes every decision on location faster and more intentional, and the resulting content is more coherent as a campaign than content produced without the pre-writing framework.

In a competitive market where image quality is increasingly commoditized, the ability to produce coherent campaign content rather than just excellent individual images is a real differentiator. Clients who have experienced both approaches — the reactive photographer who produces great images and the intentional photographer who produces great campaigns — know the difference, and they tend to come back to the second kind. Pre-writing is one of the simplest and most underused ways to move from the first category to the second.

For a full example of what pre-writing produced in a real commercial context, read the complete Rivian case study here.

1. Think about an upcoming project you have scheduled. What is the story? Can you write a one-paragraph outline of the narrative arc before the shoot?
2. Have you ever arrived on location without a clear story framework and found that the images did not cohere as a campaign? What would pre-writing have changed?
3. What do you currently do with your notes and observations from a shoot? Are you capturing specific details in the moment, or relying on memory afterward?
4. How would you present a pre-written story outline to a client during the briefing process? What would you want to communicate about why you developed it?

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.