What I Learned Managing People on a Shoot for the First Time

Shooting alone and running a shoot with other people on it are two completely different jobs. Nobody tells you that until the first time you're standing on location with an assistant or a second shooter looking at you, waiting for direction, and you realize the camera isn't the hard part anymore.

I want to walk through what actually changed for me the first time I had to lead people on a shoot, and where that ability came from long before I ever picked up a camera professionally. If you're building out your own crew or thinking about hiring your first assistant, this is one piece of the bigger system I put together in The Adventure Travel Photographer's Playbook.

Most technical photography education focuses almost entirely on the craft itself, exposure, composition, gear, workflow, and almost never addresses the fact that a growing career eventually requires managing other people. That gap in how photographers are trained means a lot of us end up learning to lead a crew the hard way, through trial and error on real shoots, rather than through anything resembling deliberate preparation.

Where the Skill Actually Came From

Long before I was managing a crew on a shoot, I was learning how to lead people in completely different settings. I was a team captain across multiple sports through college, including a Division I program, which meant getting people aligned around a shared goal wasn't a new problem for me, it was a familiar one, just in a different context. On top of that, a high school leadership course and an outdoor education program modeled loosely on Navy SEALs leadership training gave me a real framework for how to communicate expectations clearly under pressure.

None of that came from a photography background. But it turned out to matter more on set than most technical skills did, because the technical part of directing a shoot is only half the job. The other half is making sure everyone on that shoot understands the goal well enough that you're not micromanaging every decision, and trusts you enough to flag a problem the moment they see one instead of staying quiet.

What surprised me most, looking back on that transition, is how much the underlying skill translates directly across contexts. Getting a team to trust a game plan under the pressure of a close match and getting a crew to trust a shot list under the pressure of a closing weather window aren't actually that different. Both require the same basic ingredients: clarity up front, confidence under pressure, and the willingness to make a call and own it when a decision has to happen fast.

I think a lot of photographers who came up shooting solo underestimate how much of leadership is actually learnable, separate from raw personality. It's tempting to assume some people are just naturally commanding on set and others aren't, but in my experience the more accurate explanation is that people who lead well on a shoot usually picked up the underlying habits somewhere else first, whether that's sports, the military, teaching, retail management, or anything else that puts you in charge of coordinating other people toward a shared outcome. The specific context doesn't matter nearly as much as whether you've had the reps.

The first time I actually had to apply that experience to a photography set, though, I remember being surprised by how much more was riding on clear communication than it had been on a sports team. On a team, everyone already shares the same basic understanding of the game. On a shoot, an assistant or second shooter might be coming in with a completely different mental model of what the day is supposed to look like, which means the huddle has to do more work than a coach's pregame talk ever did.

I've also noticed that the leadership habits I brought from sports and outdoor education needed real adaptation, not a direct copy-paste, once applied to a creative set. A coach can lean on a scoreboard and a rulebook that everyone already agrees on. A photo shoot doesn't have that same built-in structure. The goal, the standard for what counts as a good shot, and the definition of a successful day all have to be actively communicated and re-communicated, because there's no external scoreboard doing that work automatically the way there is in competitive sports.

The Team Huddle Approach

What I actually do at the start of every shoot with more than just me on it is something close to a sports huddle. Before anything starts, I lay out the goal in plain terms. Something like: five looks today, here's what they are, here's roughly how the day should flow. Everyone gets a chance to ask questions before we start moving, not after something's already gone sideways.

That upfront clarity does most of the heavy lifting. Once everyone understands the actual goal, not just their individual task but the shape of the whole day, they can make good decisions on their own without me having to direct every single moment. That's the difference between a shoot that runs smoothly with a crew and one where I'm quietly doing everyone's job in my head while trying to also shoot.

The other half of this approach is knowing when to step back. Once the goal is clear and the day is moving, my job shifts from directing every action to watching for the moments where something actually needs my input. Micromanaging a crew that already understands the goal doesn't make the work better. It just slows everyone down and signals that you don't trust the people you brought on.

I've found it helps to revisit the huddle briefly at natural breaks in the day too, not just at the start. A quick check-in over lunch or during a location change, confirming the plan still makes sense given how the morning actually went, keeps everyone aligned without turning into constant oversight. Conditions change over the course of a shoot day more than people expect, and a plan that made perfect sense at 6 a.m. sometimes needs a small adjustment by 2 p.m.

I also try to make space in that opening huddle for people to push back on the plan if something doesn't make sense to them. Early on, I treated the huddle as a one-way briefing, me explaining the day, everyone else absorbing it. That misses a lot of value. A second shooter or assistant often has a different vantage point on a location or a piece of logistics that I hadn't fully considered, and giving them room to flag that before the day starts, rather than discovering the issue mid-shoot, has saved more than one day from going sideways.

I also try to explain the why behind a plan, not just the what, whenever time allows. Telling a crew we need five specific looks by 2 p.m. is useful information. Explaining that the client's deadline and the changing weather window are what's actually driving that timeline gives everyone the context to make smart judgment calls on their own if something shifts mid-day. People make better decisions under pressure when they understand the reasoning behind a plan, not just the instructions themselves.

The format of the huddle itself matters less than people think. It doesn't need to be formal or long. On smaller shoots it might be a five-minute conversation over coffee before anyone unpacks gear. On larger productions it might be a more structured walk-through with a call sheet. What stays constant is the underlying goal: make sure everyone leaves that conversation with the same picture of what the day is supposed to accomplish.

When to Actually Step In

The instinct a lot of new leads have, and one I had early on too, is to want to weigh in on everything. It feels like control. In practice, it's the opposite. If you've set the goal clearly and hired people you trust, most of the day should run without you needing to intervene at all.

The moments that actually need direct, honest correction are the ones where something isn't working, not just isn't being done exactly the way you'd personally do it. There's a real difference between those two things, and learning to tell them apart is a big part of what makes someone effective at leading a shoot instead of just being the person with the most experience standing around.

When something does need correcting, I've learned it works best to address it directly and honestly in the moment, not after the fact, and not by talking around the issue. People respect a direct, respectful correction far more than a vague comment they have to interpret. It also keeps small issues from turning into bigger ones later in the day.

There's a related skill here that took longer to develop: separating a correction about the work from a judgment about the person. A crew member who missed a detail because the plan wasn't clear enough needs a different conversation than one who missed it because they weren't paying attention. Reacting to both the same way, with the same tone, teaches your team the wrong lesson either way. It either makes people defensive when the actual problem was your own planning, or it lets a real attention issue slide because you were too gentle about naming it.

I've also learned to pay attention to timing when a correction is genuinely needed. Pulling someone aside privately, away from the rest of the crew and away from a client if one's present, almost always lands better than correcting someone in front of the group. A public correction, even a well-intentioned one, can feel like a much bigger deal to the person receiving it than it was meant to be, and it can also shift the mood of the entire set in a way that outlasts the actual issue being addressed.

None of this means avoiding hard conversations. It means having them in a way that actually fixes the problem instead of just making everyone, including me, feel like something was addressed. A correction that damages trust on the way to fixing a small mistake usually isn't worth the tradeoff, especially with people you're likely to work with again.

Why This Matters More Than Technical Skill

A lot of photographers assume that scaling up to bigger productions is mostly a technical and logistical problem: more gear, more permits, more moving pieces to track. That's part of it. But the bigger shift is entirely about people, and it's the part that doesn't show up in any camera settings menu.

A crew that trusts you and understands the goal will get you a better final product than a technically perfect plan run by a group that's confused or micromanaged. That's true whether it's a two-person shoot with an assistant or a full production with a producer, a second shooter, and a digital technician. The scale changes. The underlying skill doesn't.

If you're preparing to bring on your first assistant or second shooter, the biggest thing I'd tell you is to spend more time than feels necessary making sure the goal is genuinely clear before the day starts. Everything else gets easier once that part is solid. It's also worth being honest with yourself about where your own leadership habits actually came from, whether that's sports, military-adjacent training, past jobs, or nothing formal at all, because that history shapes your default style more than most people realize, and knowing your defaults makes it easier to adjust them when a particular crew or shoot calls for something different.

I'd also add that this skill develops in layers, not all at once. The first shoot where I managed even a single assistant felt genuinely uncomfortable, and I second-guessed almost every decision about when to speak up and when to step back. That discomfort faded with repetition, not because I found a formula that removed all uncertainty, but because I got more comfortable trusting my own read of a situation. Anyone starting out with their first hire should expect that same discomfort in the beginning, and shouldn't read it as a sign they're not cut out for managing a crew.

The other thing worth naming honestly is that not every crew configuration will feel natural right away, even once you're experienced. A new second shooter you haven't worked with before requires more explicit communication than someone you've worked alongside for years and can practically read without speaking. Recognizing that a slower, more deliberate start with a new team member isn't a failure of leadership, it's just what building a working relationship with someone new actually requires, has made me a lot more patient with myself and with the people I'm bringing onto a set for the first time.

I've also come to see hiring decisions themselves as part of this same leadership skill, not a separate task handled before leadership begins. Bringing on an assistant or second shooter whose working style is fundamentally incompatible with how you communicate and make decisions on set creates friction no amount of good huddles or clear goals can fully resolve. Paying attention to working style, not just technical skill, when deciding who to bring onto future shoots has saved me from repeating early mismatches that had less to do with anyone's competence and more to do with a poor fit between how we each naturally operate under pressure.

A short trial project, even something small and low-stakes, has become one of the more useful tools I have for evaluating that fit before committing to a bigger shoot together. It tells me more about how someone actually communicates under real, if modest, pressure than any conversation beforehand ever could.

Building the systems and structure around a growing team is exactly what I cover in The Adventure Travel Photographer's Playbook.

Reflection Questions

1. Where did you first learn to lead people, even if it wasn't in a photography context?
2. Do you tend to over-explain the goal or under-explain it when bringing someone onto a shoot?
3. Can you tell the difference, in the moment, between something not being done your way and something actually not working?
4. How would the people you've worked with describe your leadership style on set?

Dalton Johnson is a professional adventure and editorial photographer with over a decade of experience shooting 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.