How I Managed Three Brand Deliverables on a Seven Day Solo Alpine Project

How I Managed Three Brand Deliverables on a Seven Day Solo Alpine Project

Three Clients, One Photographer, Two Mountains

My seven day solo project through Mount Lassen and Mount Shasta was built as a behind the scenes storytelling project for three separate outdoor companies, Big Agnes, Crazy Creek, and Out There. Each of those brands had their own needs, their own products, and their own reasons for being part of this trip. I was the only person on the ground handling all three, which meant every day required a kind of mental multitasking that I do not think people fully appreciate until they try it themselves.

I want to walk through how I actually approached this, because juggling multiple deliverables solo is a real skill, separate from the photography itself. Getting a great shot is one problem. Making sure that shot serves the right client, gets logged correctly, and does not accidentally get missed in favor of a more exciting moment is a completely different problem, and it is the one that determines whether a project like this actually succeeds commercially.

Building a Plan Before the Trip Started

Before I ever left South Lake Tahoe, I spent time thinking through what each brand specifically needed from this trip. Not a vague sense of coverage, but an actual list tied to each client, product, and moment. That list became the backbone of the whole project. Without it, a seven day trip full of unpredictable events, weather delays, an extra load into Horse Camp, a rescue situation on summit day, would have made it far too easy to lose track of whether I was actually serving all three clients or just chasing whatever felt most exciting that day.

Having that list also helped me make decisions quickly when plans changed, which they did constantly. When the south entrance to Lassen was closed on day two and I lost an hour and a half driving to the north entrance instead, I did not have to stop and figure out what mattered most. I already knew, and I could adjust the day around that priority instead of improvising from scratch under time pressure.

Keeping the Three Brands Separate in My Head

Product photography for three different brands at the same location can blur together fast if you are not careful. I made a point of shooting deliberately for one brand at a time whenever possible, rather than trying to capture everything at once in a rush. That slowed individual moments down but made the footage far easier to sort and deliver correctly once the trip was over.

The two night push on Mount Shasta is a good example of how this actually played out. I carried gear and products for multiple brands into Horse Camp, realized partway through setup that I needed a second load including my tripod, camera kit, and the Crazy Creek and Out There products specifically, and had to ski back down and hike back up again to get everything in place. That extra trip was frustrating in the moment, but it also forced me to physically separate and organize what belonged to which brand before I ever started shooting, which paid off later during editing.

I also kept a running mental tally, day by day, of which brand had gotten strong coverage and which one was falling behind. That tally lived in my head rather than on paper, since stopping to write things down constantly was not realistic on a trip this physically demanding. But checking in with myself each evening, usually during a quick edit session in the van, kept any one client from accidentally dominating the trip at the expense of the other two.

Making Room for Each Brand on the Hardest Days

Summit day on Shasta was the single hardest day to manage three deliverables at once, simply because there was so much else happening. I was up at three in the morning, dealt with a forgotten helmet that cost an hour and a half, climbed Avalanche Bulge in the dark, and then spent roughly two hours helping coordinate a helicopter rescue near The Thumb as a Wilderness First Responder. On a day like that, it would have been easy to let brand deliverables slide entirely in favor of just surviving and documenting the climb itself.

I made a conscious choice not to let that happen completely, while also being realistic about what the day could support. Some planned shots simply did not happen, and I made peace with that rather than pretending otherwise. What did happen was intentional, tied back to the pre trip list, even in the middle of an unpredictable and physically demanding day. That balance, between rigid planning and honest flexibility, is really the whole skill.

I also had to make peace with a simple truth about days like that one. A rescue situation is not a scheduling conflict to be managed around a shot list. It is a real emergency involving a real person, and it comes first, without negotiation. Once that was handled and the climb continued, I picked the brand priorities back up where I had left them, but the order of importance in that moment was never in question.

Why Working Alone Made This Both Harder and Clearer

There was no producer keeping track of deliverables while I focused on shooting. Every decision about which brand needed attention at a given moment was mine, made in real time, often while also managing altitude, fatigue, and weather. That is genuinely harder than working with a team, where these decisions can be distributed and double checked.

But there was also a clarity in working alone that a bigger team sometimes loses. I never had to explain my reasoning to anyone else or negotiate competing opinions about which client mattered most in a given moment. I made the call, moved forward, and trusted the plan I had built before the trip started. That trust in the plan is what let me manage three brands without a full crew, even on days as chaotic as summit day on Shasta turned out to be.

What I Learned About Managing Multiple Clients Solo

The biggest lesson from this trip is that managing multiple brand deliverables solo is mostly a planning problem, not a shooting problem. The actual photography, once you know what you are looking for, is the easier part. Knowing what you are looking for across three different clients, while also climbing two mountains alone, is where the real difficulty lives.

I would tell anyone taking on a similar project to build the client priority list before the trip, not during it, and to accept honestly that not every planned shot will happen on the hardest days. A realistic plan that survives contact with a rescue situation or an unplanned second carry up a mountain is worth far more than a perfect plan that assumes everything will go smoothly. Nothing on this trip went entirely smoothly, and all three brands still got what they needed by the time I was back in South Lake Tahoe.

The other thing I would pass on is to resist the urge to treat every deliverable as equally urgent every single day. Some days simply belong more to one brand than another, based on what the terrain and the schedule naturally offer. Fighting that instead of working with it wastes energy you need for the physical demands of the trip itself. Once I stopped forcing balance into every single day and instead let it average out across the full week, the whole project felt more sustainable and the final coverage for each client actually improved.

Dalton Johnson is a commercial photographer and director of photography based in South Lake Tahoe, California. Over the last decade he has worked with brands including Patagonia, GoPro, Arc'teryx, Four Seasons, Nike, Rivian, and Big Agnes across all seven continents. He documents adventure, travel, and the outdoors through photography, film, and writing. Follow along at dalton-johnson.com.