Shoot days are expensive, so they tend to be planned around one headline need: the website hero, the launch film, the billboard. Everything else gets whatever is left over. A few weeks later, the social team is cropping a landscape photo into a vertical story and wishing someone had asked them.
List every place the content will live
Before the shot list, write the channel list: website pages, product listings, social posts and stories, ads in several sizes, print, presentations. Each has its own shape and its own job. A shot list written from that is very different from one written from a mood board.
Shoot for both shapes
Most content now needs a vertical and a horizontal version. Cropping one from the other rarely works. Planning both on the day, with the framing to match, costs minutes; fixing it afterwards costs a reshoot.
Capture the small pieces
Details, textures, hands, short clips of a process, the empty set before people walk in. These cost almost nothing on the day and become backgrounds, transitions and fillers for months. They are also what makes a brand’s content feel like its own rather than borrowed.
Know when CGI is the better camera
Some things are easier to build than to photograph: products that do not exist yet, colour variants, impossible angles, packaging in a hundred sizes. CGI lets you change a product after launch without booking another studio. The best plans mix both, using each where it is strongest.
