What I Learned Directing Myself and One Other Person on a Campaign

There is a version of commercial production where the director is separate from the photographer, the photographer is separate from the camera operator, the camera operator is separate from the gaffer, and everyone has a single defined role within a clear hierarchy. That version of production exists and it produces excellent work when the budget supports it.

The reality of outdoor commercial production at the level where most meaningful brand relationships happen is a small crew doing many jobs simultaneously. On the Oru Kayak Lake campaign, there were two crew members and two talent. The photographer was also the director, the camera operator, the underwater swimmer, the drone pilot, and the post-production supervisor. Directing yourself within that context is one of the harder creative skills to develop and one of the most valuable. Here is what five days of it taught: Oru Kayak Lake Campaign.

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The Challenge of Being Director and Photographer at the Same Time

The director's job is to hold the vision of the whole. To know what story is being told, what every element of the frame is contributing to that story, and whether the cumulative decisions being made on set are producing something worth watching. The photographer's job is to be fully present in the technical execution of capturing that vision. Those two modes of attention pull in different directions and occupying both simultaneously requires a deliberate internal practice.

When you are looking through a viewfinder, the framing, the light, the focus, and the timing are consuming your full attention. It is almost impossible to simultaneously evaluate whether what you are capturing serves the larger creative vision of the campaign. The best sports photographers describe a similar challenge: being fully present in the moment while also maintaining awareness of the game's larger context. The solution is not to try to hold both states simultaneously. It is to alternate between them deliberately.

The practical solution on the Oru Kayak campaign was to build the creative direction into the setup before picking up the camera rather than trying to maintain the director's perspective while shooting. Every setup began with a director's decision: what is this moment supposed to feel like, what does the talent need to be doing, what does the frame need to contain. Once those decisions were made, the camera came out and the photographer's attention could focus entirely on capturing the thing that had already been directed. The director's perspective came back on during reviews between setups and during the midday break when the day's material was assessed against the overall vision.

How to Direct Talent on a Small Production

The talent brief on the Oru Kayak campaign was built around the concept of the kayak bringing the kid out in you. Translating that concept into specific talent direction that actually produced the feeling on camera required a different approach than a traditional talent brief with a detailed shot list and specific marks to hit.

The most effective direction on small productions is permission rather than instruction. Telling talent exactly what to do produces performance. Giving talent permission to be exactly who they are in a context that is genuinely enjoyable produces presence. The difference between the two is visible in the final content. Performance reads as performance even when the talent is skilled. Presence reads as real even when the camera is obvious.

The direction for most of the Oru Kayak production was some version of: do what you would actually do if you were here for yourself rather than for a camera. Jump off that rock if it looks fun. Splash your paddle if that is what you feel like doing. Sit in the kayak for a minute before getting in the water and just look around at where you are. Those moments of genuine response to the environment, captured rather than directed, produced the best content of the campaign. The art of small crew talent direction is creating the conditions for real moments to happen and then being ready to capture them when they do.

Managing Crew Energy With Two People

The energy management challenge of a five-day road trip production with two crew members is different from a larger production where energy management is distributed across a team. When there are two people and one of them is also the creative director, the photographer, the drone pilot, and the post-production supervisor, that person is carrying an enormous load. Protecting the energy needed to do all of those jobs well across five consecutive days requires deliberate choices about where to spend effort and where to conserve it.

The physical demands of the Oru Kayak production were significant. Loading and unloading kayaks, camera cases, drone cases, and housing gear multiple times per day. Swimming in cold mountain water with a camera housing. Getting in position before sunrise after waking at 4:00 AM. Moving between locations in the midday window. By day three, the gap between the energy needed to produce excellent content and the energy available to produce it was real and required active management.

Leading by example was the most effective energy management tool available. When morale was low on a cold morning, getting in the water first, setting up first, being visibly energized about the location, changed the energy of the set more effectively than any amount of verbal encouragement. On one particularly demanding morning, starting the day with a cold plunge before the cameras came out reset the crew and the talent entirely. It was a deliberate 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 small crew through the moments when the easier option is appealing and the harder option is the one the production actually needs.

What Small Crew Productions Do Better

The conventional wisdom in commercial production is that more crew produces better content because more people can cover more angles, handle more logistics, and solve more problems simultaneously. That is true up to a point and becomes false beyond it. Small crew productions have advantages that large ones cannot replicate and those advantages matter enormously for the kind of outdoor lifestyle content that brands in this space need.

The agility of a two-person crew moving through a location is dramatically greater than a ten-person crew with a full equipment load. A two-person crew can be in position at a river access point in twenty minutes. A ten-person crew takes an hour or more to set up. In a production where the best light lasts thirty minutes per window, that agility is worth more than any amount of additional coverage capability. The first crew is already in position when the light hits. The second crew is still unloading cases.

Small crew productions also produce content that feels different from large ones. The presence of a large crew changes how talent behaves. People who are naturally relaxed and playful in their environment become self-conscious when surrounded by cameras, lighting rigs, and a production team watching their every move. Two people and a camera is closer to documentary than to commercial production and it produces content that carries the authenticity of documentary even when it is fully commercial in purpose. The Oru Kayak campaign was specifically designed to be a small crew production because the concept required talent who felt like they were actually on a road trip rather than performing for a brand campaign. A large crew would have made that impossible.

The One Thing That Would Change

Looking back at the Oru Kayak campaign, one production decision would be made differently on a future version of the same project. Not the concept, not the locations, not the deliverable structure. The crew size. Specifically, one additional person whose job was to manage the digital backend exclusively: backing up cards, reviewing footage, organizing selects, and handling the logistical management that was currently falling on the photographer between production windows.

The evening review and backup process, essential for keeping post-production manageable, was happening after ten to twelve hours of physical production at the end of every day. Doing it tired, with a 4:00 AM wake-up coming, is not ideal conditions for making sound editorial decisions. An additional crew member focused specifically on digital asset management would have freed the photographer-director to rest, which would have improved the quality of creative decision-making across every subsequent day of the production.

One additional talent would also have improved the library. Two talent in two kayaks produces a specific dynamic: two people doing a thing together. Three talent produces more variety, more relationship energy, and more of the spontaneous group interactions that make lifestyle content feel alive. The road trip concept is inherently communal and more people would have served it better. Both of those additions are straightforward to build into the budget on future productions. The lesson applies broadly: the things that most improve small crew productions are almost always additional people freed to focus on specific functions, not additional cameras or more complex gear systems.

Why Small Crew Mastery Is a Competitive Advantage

The ability to direct yourself and a small crew through a complex multi-format production is one of the most valuable skills in outdoor commercial photography and one of the least discussed. Most photographers focus on the technical skills: the camera settings, the lighting, the gear. Those skills matter. But the photographer who can also direct talent toward genuine presence, manage crew energy across consecutive demanding days, hold the director's vision while executing the photographer's technical work, and deliver a complete campaign library from a lean production is solving a problem that a technically excellent photographer who lacks those skills cannot solve.

Brands at the budget level where most meaningful outdoor commercial relationships happen need photographers who can do all of it. Not because they want to pay for less. Because the best content for their purposes often comes from small crews who can move fast, get into places larger crews cannot reach, and capture talent in conditions where they are genuinely present rather than performing for a production. Developing small crew mastery is not a budget compromise. It is a creative and competitive advantage that compounds with every production it is applied to.

The Skill That Compounds Fastest

Among all the skills developed through small crew multi-format production, the one that compounds fastest over time is the ability to read a situation quickly and make the right creative call without deliberation. On a large production, creative decisions can be discussed, prototyped, and evaluated before they are committed to. On a small crew production moving through five locations in five days, the decision window is often seconds rather than minutes. The photographer who has developed fast creative instincts through repeated small crew experience makes those decisions correctly more often than the photographer who has only worked on larger productions where there was always time to deliberate.

That speed of creative decision-making is one of the most valuable things a photographer can bring to a client relationship. Brands hiring a small crew production are implicitly trusting that the photographer's judgment in the field is sound enough to produce campaign-quality content without the oversight and redundancy that a larger production provides. That trust is earned through a track record of making fast calls that turn out to be right. It is built through exactly the kind of production the Oru Kayak campaign represented: high stakes, lean crew, limited time, no margin for extended deliberation on any single decision.

Every small crew production makes that judgment faster and more reliable. Every set of decisions made under real production pressure calibrates the instincts that the next production will run on. The photographers who have done the most small crew multi-format work in the outdoor industry are almost always the ones whose creative judgment is most trusted by the brands they work with. That trust is the foundation of the long-term partnerships worth building and it starts with being willing to direct yourself and one other person through the kinds of productions that develop the instincts worth having.

Book a discovery call to talk about what a small crew integrated campaign could look like for your brand: dalton-johnson.com.

1. How do you currently separate the director's perspective from the photographer's technical attention on set, and do you have a deliberate practice for moving between those two modes?
2. What is your current approach to talent direction on small productions and are you giving talent genuine permission to be present rather than instructing them toward specific performances?
3. What specific functions on your current productions are consuming your attention that could be handled by an additional crew member, freeing you to stay in the creative director role?
4. Think about a production where the small crew format produced something that a larger production could not have. What was it about the intimacy or agility of the small crew that made that content possible?

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.