Planning a Shot List Before a Visual Post

Sunday evening, you sit down to write up your first attempt at sourdough. There are sixty photos on your phone, and fifty-four of them show the finished loaf from slightly different angles. The story you actually want to tell depends on the sticky, collapsed mess from Friday night, and nobody photographed that. It went in the bin two days ago.

A shot list exists to prevent that evening. It is a short note, written before the camera comes out, that says which pictures your story will need. Ten minutes and the back of an envelope will do, and you will spend far less time later wishing you could go back.

Write the story in one line first

A list of pictures is hard to write until you know what they are for. So begin with a single sentence that says what the post is going to claim or show. “A morning at the flower market” is only a place and a time. “The market is at its best before the buyers arrive, when the stallholders are still unpacking” gives you something to photograph.

That second sentence already tells you things. You need to arrive early. You want crates, wet floors and half-empty buckets, and you can probably skip the tidy bouquets everyone else will shoot at ten o’clock. It is the same question we suggest asking when choosing a cover, only asked sooner, while you can still do something about the answer.

Turn the sentence into moments

Next, tell the story to yourself out loud as if to a friend, and write down each moment where you would say “and then”. Those moments are the bones of your list. Try to describe things that happen, since a moment gives you something to wait for and a topic only gives you something to point at.

Here is how the imaginary flower market post might look at this stage:

1. The street outside, still dark, with one van’s doors open.
2. Crates being carried in, seen from behind.
3. Hands cutting string and stripping lower leaves.
4. A floor covered in stems and water.
5. Buckets filling up, the stall starting to look like a stall.
6. A pause: someone drinking coffee among the flowers.
7. The first customer of the day.

Seven lines, and you can already see a beginning, some change and an ending. If your list reads like seven versions of the same thing, the story may not have enough movement in it yet. That is much cheaper to discover now than on Sunday evening.

Give each line a job

With the moments in place, go back through and note what each picture has to do in the post. A few jobs come up again and again:

• The cover. Your cover runs wide at the top of the post and gets cropped into squares and circles elsewhere, so the help page suggests keeping the subject close to the middle with some space around it. Mark one line as the cover candidate and shoot it with that crop in mind. Take it both ways if you can.
• The “where are we” picture. One frame wide enough to place the reader, usually near the start.
• The detail. A close view that slows things down between wider shots.
• The turn. The picture where something changes: the bread collapses, the rain starts, the shop opens.
• The ending. A frame that feels finished, even if it is a quiet one.

A note of two or three words beside each line is plenty: “wide, opener”, “close, hands”, “cover, centred”. Writing “close” or “wide” now also spares you from coming home with seven medium shots, which is the problem our guide to building a photo essay warns about. You can go deeper on running order later, too. For now it is enough that the list could plausibly be put in a sequence with some rhythm to it.

Keep it short enough to use

A shot list that fills two pages stays in your pocket. Once you are out in the world, with cold hands and something happening in front of you, you will glance at it for three seconds at most. Our suggestion is to keep it to what fits on one side of an index card or one phone screen.

If that feels too tight, split the list in two:

• Must have. Three to five pictures without which the story falls apart. For the sourdough post, the collapsed loaf is one of these.
• Nice to have. Everything else, to be chased only if there is time and the light is kind.

Now you know what to do when the day goes wrong. Your battery is at nine percent and the van is leaving, so you get the must-haves and let the others go without a second thought.

Plan the day around the list

The order you shoot in is rarely the order the post will run in, and that is fine. Look through your list and ask which pictures have a deadline. Some moments happen only once, like a cake coming out of the oven or the first customer of the morning. Others will wait for you, like a shop sign or a view from the bridge. Put the ones that cannot be repeated at the top of your attention.

A few other small questions are worth a moment beforehand:

• Where will the light be? If the story needs that window table in soft daylight, a morning visit and an evening visit will give you two different posts.
• Who is in the frame? If your list includes people, plan to ask them, and plan what you will say. The posting rules ask whether the people in a picture would be comfortable seeing it, and that conversation is easier before the camera comes up than after.
• What should stay out? Addresses, phone numbers and other private details have a habit of turning up on doors and vans. Keep them in mind as you frame.
• What will the words carry? Some moments are better told than shown. If you know a line on the list will be hard to photograph, it may be happier as a sentence in the post or a caption beside another picture.

Leave room for the picture you didn’t plan

The best frame in a post is often one nobody could have listed: a dog asleep in a crate of lilies, or a stallholder laughing at something off to the side. A shot list should make room for these moments, and it usually does, because once the must-haves are done you can relax and look around.

So treat the list as a floor and never as a fence. When something better happens, photograph it and worry about the plan afterwards. If the surprise is strong enough, it may even change your one-line story, and that is a good reason to rewrite it.

Before you pack up, take thirty seconds to read the list again and tick what you have. This is the moment a shot list really pays for itself, because a missing picture is still only a few steps away. Once you are home, keep the list next to you while you pick your photos. Comparing what you planned with what you got will show you the story you ended up with, and it might be better than the one you set out to tell.

Next time you have a post in mind, try it on the smallest possible scale: one sentence, five lines, one card. See whether Sunday evening goes a little differently.