The Planning Mistake That Ruins an Overlanding Shoot
I've done a fair number of overlanding trips over the years, including work built around a Rivian, and the mistake that ruins these shoots almost never shows up on shoot day itself. It shows up weeks earlier, in the planning phase, when the trip gets treated as a driving itinerary with photography squeezed in around it instead of the other way around. By the time you're actually on the road, that early planning mistake has already decided how much good light you'll get, how rushed camp will feel, and whether you have any energy left for the shots that actually matter.
I learned this the hard way on more than one early overlanding trip, watching a genuinely beautiful route produce a thin, rushed set of images because the plan never left room for photography to lead. If you want a fuller framework for building a production calendar around a trip like this instead of just a route, I lay it out in The Adventure Travel Photographer's Playbook. Here's the specific planning mistake I see over and over, and what I do differently now.
The Mistake That Keeps Showing Up
The mistake, plainly, is planning the trip as a series of driving legs first and treating photography as something that happens whenever the vehicle happens to stop. A route gets built around fuel stops, campsite bookings, and total mileage, and the actual images get left to chance, captured opportunistically whenever the light happens to be decent and the group happens to be in a good mood.
That approach works fine for a personal road trip with no deliverable attached. It falls apart fast on a shoot with a client brief, because opportunistic images rarely match a specific creative ask. A brand wanting a vehicle framed against a canyon at golden hour needs that moment planned for specifically, not stumbled into on the way to a gas station.
The fix isn't complicated in concept, but it does require flipping the planning order. Instead of building a route and hoping for photography, I now build the photography plan first and fit the driving legs around it, even when that means a shorter travel day or an earlier start than the route alone would demand.
Planning the Route Like a Shot List, Not a Drive
For any overlanding assignment, I now start with a rough shot list tied to specific points along the route, rather than a general sense of "there will be nice scenery." That list includes the vehicle-in-landscape frames, the lifestyle and camp moments, and any activity-specific images the brief calls for, each one tied to an approximate location and time of day.
Once that shot list exists, the driving plan gets built to arrive at each location during the right light window, rather than whenever the day's mileage happens to land the group there. That sometimes means a shorter driving day to arrive somewhere by late afternoon instead of after dark, even if the route on paper looks drivable in a single longer push.
This reordering also forces an honest look at how many locations a single trip can actually support well. A route with eight stops squeezed into four days sounds ambitious on a map, but if the shot list demands real time at each one, that same route might only support four stops done properly.
Underestimating How Much Daylight a Travel Day Actually Eats
Overlanding routes often include unpaved roads, water crossings, or technical sections that take dramatically longer than a paved-road mileage estimate suggests. I've watched a planned two-hour drive stretch into four hours because of a rutted forest road, and that stretch doesn't just cost time, it costs the exact light window the day's photography depended on.
I now build a deliberate buffer into every travel estimate for overlanding-specific terrain, rather than trusting a standard mapping app's time estimate, which is built around ordinary road driving and doesn't account for the realities of a rough track or an unexpected obstacle.
When a travel day does run long despite the buffer, I've learned to protect the light-dependent shots first and treat the rest of the shot list as flexible. Losing a lifestyle shot to a delayed arrival is recoverable. Losing the one golden-hour vehicle shot the whole day was built around usually isn't.
Packing Camera Gear for the Vehicle, Not for the Story
A related planning mistake is packing camera gear around what fits conveniently in the vehicle rather than around what the shot list actually requires. Overlanding rigs have limited storage, and it's tempting to leave a longer lens or a second body behind because space is tight, without fully accounting for what that gear was supposed to cover on the shot list.
I now pack against the shot list directly, treating gear space as a planning constraint that gets solved before the trip rather than compromised on mid-route. If the list calls for a compression shot using a longer lens, that lens gets a guaranteed spot in the vehicle, and something else gets left behind instead.
This also applies to backup gear. Overlanding routes frequently put cameras through more dust, vibration, and rough handling than a standard shoot, and a plan that doesn't leave room for a backup body or a repair kit is a plan that's betting the whole trip on nothing going wrong.
Skipping a Recovery Day in the Schedule
Overlanding days are physically demanding in a way that's easy to underestimate during planning, especially when the itinerary is built by someone thinking about mileage rather than about who's actually going to be alert enough to shoot well on day four or five.
I build at least one lighter recovery day into any multi-day overlanding schedule now, a day with shorter driving and less demanding photography, specifically to protect energy for the trip's more important shot days. Skipping this in the name of covering more ground has cost me sharper, more deliberate images later in past trips.
This matters even more when the trip combines overlanding with another demanding activity, camping, hiking, or a technical route, since the cumulative fatigue compounds faster than a single-activity itinerary would suggest, and a plan that doesn't account for that fatigue tends to produce visibly tired, less considered images by the back half of the trip.
Choosing Camp Sites for Convenience Instead of Light
It's easy to choose an overlanding campsite based on convenience: proximity to the day's last stop, availability, or ease of access for the vehicle. But camp is also where a huge share of the lifestyle photography happens, the tent, the fire, the gear laid out, the quiet evening frames that often end up being more valuable to a client than the driving shots themselves.
I now scout campsite options with the evening and morning light in mind specifically, not just vehicle access, checking which direction the site faces and what the surrounding terrain will do to the light during the exact hours camp photography happens.
A campsite chosen purely for convenience can put the vehicle and tent in flat, uninteresting light for the entire evening, wasting what's often the single richest photography window of the whole day. Building light into the site selection criteria, not just logistics, has changed the quality of my camp imagery significantly.
Letting Fuel and Water Logistics Dictate the Photography by Accident
Fuel range and water supply are real constraints on any overlanding route, and it's tempting to let them quietly drive every other decision, including where and when photography happens, without deliberately weighing that tradeoff.
I now map fuel and water logistics against the shot list at the same time I build the route, rather than solving logistics first and letting photography adapt to whatever's left. If a key shot location sits just outside comfortable fuel range, I plan a specific detour or resupply point for it rather than quietly dropping that location because it wasn't logistically convenient.
This upfront mapping has saved more than one planned shot from getting silently cut later in the trip, when fuel anxiety in the moment would have otherwise pushed the group toward the safer, closer option instead of the location the brief actually called for.
Not Pre-Visualizing the Vehicle-in-Landscape Frames
Vehicle-in-landscape photography is a genuinely different compositional problem than either subject alone, and it goes badly when a photographer arrives at a location without having pre-visualized roughly what that frame needs to look like, the vantage point, the scale relationship, the direction of light.
I now spend time before the trip looking at reference images and satellite imagery for key locations, forming a rough mental picture of where I'll need to stand and what time of day the light will support that composition, rather than improvising entirely on arrival.
Arriving with even a rough pre-visualization dramatically cuts down how long it takes to find the right vantage point once on location, which matters enormously when the light window for that exact shot might only last twenty minutes.
The Planning System I Actually Use Now
Put together, my current overlanding planning process starts with the shot list, builds the route and camp choices around that list's light and location requirements, adds honest time buffers for rough terrain, and reserves at least one recovery day for multi-day trips. Fuel and gear logistics get solved against that plan, not ahead of it.
This is a meaningfully different process than the route-first planning I used to do, and it takes more upfront work before a single mile gets driven. But the difference in what actually comes back from the trip, in both quantity and quality of usable images, has made that upfront work worth it every time.
If a trip's route still feels driven by mileage and convenience rather than by the images it needs to produce, that's usually the sign the planning happened in the wrong order, and it's worth going back and rebuilding the plan around the shot list before the vehicle ever leaves the driveway.
What I Actually Pack for a Multi-Day Overlanding Assignment
Beyond the camera-specific gear decisions, a multi-day overlanding assignment carries its own packing logic that took me a few uncomfortable trips to work out properly. Recovery gear, a real first aid kit, extra water beyond what feels strictly necessary, and redundant navigation tools all compete for the same limited space as camera equipment, and I've learned to build the full packing list at once rather than filling the vehicle with photography gear first and hoping recovery essentials fit into whatever space is left over afterward.
Power management deserves its own line of planning entirely. Charging multiple camera batteries, a laptop for nightly review, and drone batteries off a vehicle's electrical system or a portable solar setup requires knowing in advance exactly how much draw the trip's shooting schedule will actually demand, rather than assuming a vague sense of "it'll probably be fine" will hold up across four or five consecutive shoot days without an actual charging plan behind it.
I've also learned to pack a genuinely separate weatherproof case for backup drives, since a multi-day trip without a nightly backup routine risks losing an entire trip's footage to a single card failure or vehicle mishap. Redundant storage that lives in a different part of the vehicle than the primary gear has saved more than one trip's footage when a bag got wet or misplaced during a rough section of trail.
How I Brief a Client Before an Overlanding Trip Begins
Client expectations for overlanding content need a different kind of pre-trip conversation than a standard single-location shoot, mostly because the client isn't always familiar with how genuinely unpredictable multi-day travel through remote terrain can be. I walk clients through the realistic range of outcomes before departure, rather than promising a specific fixed shot list that weather, terrain, or mechanical issues could easily disrupt.
Part of this conversation involves setting expectations around communication delays. Remote overlanding routes often mean limited or no cell service for stretches of a trip, and I let clients know upfront when they should expect check-ins and when they genuinely shouldn't expect to hear from me at all, so silence during a planned dead zone doesn't read as a problem when it's actually just the expected reality of the route.
I also walk through contingency options directly with the client before departure: what happens if a planned location becomes inaccessible, what the backup shot list looks like, and how weather delays get handled within the overall delivery timeline. Clients who understand these contingencies upfront respond far better to an inevitable mid-trip adjustment than clients who were only given the best-case version of the plan.
Vehicle Maintenance as a Photography Planning Concern
A mechanical issue with the vehicle doesn't just threaten the trip itself, it directly threatens the photography plan built around that trip's specific timeline and locations, which is why I've come to treat vehicle maintenance as genuinely part of pre-shoot planning rather than a separate logistical concern handled by someone else entirely. Before any multi-day overlanding assignment, I confirm the vehicle has had a thorough recent service check specific to the terrain the trip will actually cover, not just a general checkup that assumes standard road driving.
I also build basic mechanical contingency into the schedule itself, identifying in advance where the nearest service options are relative to each stage of the planned route, so that a breakdown doesn't turn into an open-ended delay with no clear next step. Knowing this in advance has, more than once, let me make a fast, informed decision about whether to wait for a repair locally or adjust the remaining shot list around a shortened timeline instead.
This kind of planning matters even more on international or unfamiliar-region overlanding assignments, where local mechanical support and parts availability can differ significantly from what I'd expect at home. I research this specifically as part of location scouting now, treating vehicle reliability logistics with the same seriousness I'd give to weather or permit research for the same trip.
Overlanding shoots reward this kind of upfront discipline more than almost any other genre I work in, since there's rarely a chance to simply come back and reshoot a missed location. If you want the fuller framework I use for building a production plan around a route like this, it's covered in The Adventure Photographer's Playbook.
Reflection Questions
- Does your current trip planning start with the route or with the shot list?
- What buffer do you build into travel-time estimates for rough or technical terrain?
- Have you ever lost a valuable shot because a campsite was chosen for convenience instead of light?
- Where in your process could a recovery day protect the quality of your later shot days?
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.