Solo Adventure Photography: How to Be the Subject and the Photographer at the Same Time
Solo Adventure Photography: How to Be the Subject and the Photographer at the Same Time
The Problem Nobody Else Solves for You
On a normal shoot, someone else points the camera at you. On my seven day solo project across Mount Lassen and Mount Shasta, that job fell to me, on top of climbing, skiing, and managing three brand deliverables. Being both the subject and the photographer sounds like a small logistical detail until you actually try to do it in real conditions, with cold hands, uncertain footing, and nobody around to tell you whether the shot worked before you move on.
I want to walk through how I actually approached this, because it is one of the more practical skills a solo creator needs and one that almost nobody explains clearly. It is not about pressing a timer and hoping. It requires planning, some technical tricks, and a willingness to accept a lower success rate than you would get with a second person behind the camera.
Deciding When You Actually Need to Be in the Frame
Not every shot needed me in it. A lot of the strongest images from this trip are landscapes, gear, or moments where my presence would have distracted from the story rather than added to it. The first decision, before any technical setup, was figuring out which specific moments actually needed a human being visible for scale or narrative reasons, and which ones were better served by staying purely behind the camera.
Scale was usually the clearest signal. A huge slope on Lassen or the vastness of the summit push on Shasta needed a human figure somewhere in the frame to communicate just how big the terrain actually was. Product shots, on the other hand, often worked better without me in them at all, letting the gear from Big Agnes, Crazy Creek, and Out There speak for itself against the landscape.
The Actual Setup Process
Once I decided a shot needed me in it, the process usually started with a tripod, a locked composition, and a self timer or remote trigger. I would set the frame using the terrain and lighting as my guide, walk into position, and hope I had judged the composition correctly without being able to see through the viewfinder in that exact spot. This is where solo self portraiture gets genuinely difficult. You are guessing at your own position relative to a frame you set up before walking away from the camera.
I usually took several attempts for any shot involving me, adjusting position slightly each time based on what I could see reviewing the small screen after walking back to the camera. That back and forth, walk into position, trigger the shot, walk back, check, adjust, walk into position again, ate real time on every shoot. On a schedule as tight as this one, that time cost had to be planned for rather than discovered in the moment.
What Changes When the Terrain Gets Serious
Self portraiture on flat, safe ground is one thing. Doing it on the approach to Mount Lassen, wearing regular shoes with my ski boots strapped outside my pack, or anywhere near the technical terrain on Shasta, is a different problem entirely. Walking back and forth to check a frame is not always possible or safe on steep or unstable ground, which meant accepting more uncertainty in those settings than I would tolerate somewhere easier.
On summit day, this became especially clear. Between the forgotten helmet that cost an hour and a half, the rescue situation near The Thumb that took roughly two hours to help coordinate, and the general demands of climbing at altitude, there simply was not time or safety margin for an elaborate self portrait setup at every promising moment. I had to be selective, choosing only the compositions that mattered most and accepting that some good opportunities would pass without being captured at all.
Working With a Drone as a Second Angle
The drone became useful specifically for this problem on the days conditions supported flying it. An aerial view can capture a small human figure moving through big terrain in a way that a ground based self timer setup cannot easily replicate. It removed some of the walk back and forth entirely, since I could fly, frame, and adjust remotely while continuing to move rather than repeatedly walking into and out of a fixed composition.
That said, the drone came with its own limits, mainly battery life and the conditions question I have written about elsewhere from this same trip. It was not a universal solution, just one more tool that helped on the specific days and specific terrain where it made sense, alongside the more traditional tripod and self timer approach for everything else.
Accepting a Lower Hit Rate
The single hardest adjustment for me on this trip was accepting that self portraiture solo simply does not produce the same success rate as working with a second photographer. Compositions that would take two or three attempts with someone else behind the camera sometimes took ten or fifteen attempts alone, and some never worked at all within the time I had available.
I had to make peace with that math before the trip started, because getting frustrated by it in the field would have cost more time and energy than the missed shots were worth. Instead, I focused on making sure the shots that did work were meaningful and honest, rather than chasing a perfect hit rate that was never realistic given the actual constraints of working completely alone.
There is also a strange kind of vulnerability in reviewing images of yourself, exhausted and struggling, on a small camera screen in the middle of a hard day. Most of the time I am the one deciding what other people's hardest moments look like through a lens. Turning that same unflinching eye on myself, tired on the approach to Lassen or wrecked after a long climb on Shasta, took some getting used to, and I think it made me a more honest editor of my own work by the end of the trip.
What I Would Tell Another Solo Creator
If you are planning a solo trip where you need to appear in your own work, build extra time into every shot that requires you in the frame. Plan your locked compositions with generous framing so small positioning errors do not ruin the shot entirely. And be honest with yourself about which moments genuinely need you visible versus which ones work fine without you, since trying to include yourself in everything will slow down a trip that likely already has enough physical demands without adding unnecessary technical complexity on top of it.
Being both subject and photographer on this trip taught me patience I did not fully have before. It also gave me a strange kind of empathy for my own work, since I experienced firsthand what it costs to stand in front of a camera you also have to operate, something I now think about differently when I photograph other people going through hard, uncomfortable moments of their own.
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.