Most shoot days that go wrong were lost before the photographer picked up a camera. In twenty-five years of commercial work, antiques to architecture, I can usually tell within one email whether a booking will run smooth or run long, and the difference is the quality of the brief, not the size of the budget. A clear brief from a small business with a modest fee beats a vague one from a blue-chip, because the first produces usable files on schedule and the second produces a reshoot. Here is what a working brief contains, and why each item earns its place.
Start with where the pictures will live
The single most useful sentence in any brief is not about the pictures at all. It is a list of destinations: website hero, Amazon and Noon listings, printed catalogue, trade-show banner, Instagram. Every destination has a shape, and shapes conflict. A square marketplace tile crops differently from a 3:2 website banner and a vertical A5 brochure page, and a shot composed for one is often unusable for another. When I know the destinations up front, I shoot each set-up with the crops in mind, sometimes framing wider and moving key detail away from the edges. One sentence of destinations can double the usable yield from a day.
If you already know specific portals matter, say so by name, because their rules are stricter than most clients guess. The dimension and white-background requirements for marketplace listings are covered in the marketplace rules article, and the same logic applies to estate-agent portals with their own hard specifications.
The shot list, ranked, not just listed
A brief should name the must-have shots in priority order, and be honest about what is a maybe. On a product day I will happily work through forty SKUs, but if the van is booked for half past four and there are hero shots still undone, the ranked list is what saves the day. Rank by commercial value: the one product that carries the website gets shot first, in the best light, with the most care, and the long tail fills the remaining hours. Clients who rank get exactly what they needed even if the day shortens. Clients who hand me an unranked list of everything get everything done to the same medium standard.
Include reference images, and say what you like about them. "Like the attached" is ambiguous: is it the lighting, the background, the mood, or the fact their competitor used it? One sentence per reference, naming the specific thing borrowed, removes an hour of trial and error on the day.
Logistics that look trivial and are not
- Access times for every location, including load-in, and who meets the photographer with keys. A locked premises with the keyholder in a meeting is forty minutes of a paid day gone.
- Power: which sockets work, how far the nearest one is from where the set will be, and whether the fuse board trips on kettle plus lights together.
- Whether people in frame have signed model releases, and who is responsible for collecting them. Nobody signs a release after the shoot.
- Props, styling and who brings them. The most common day-killer in interior and hospitality work is a "we assumed you were bringing that" moment at 10am.
- Weather contingency for anything outdoors. A car shoot on location is a plan A and a plan B, agreed before the day, not improvised in the rain. The practical realities of location work are in the car photography article.
- Cleanliness of the items themselves. Products photographed with fingerprints, and rooms shot with bins and cables in frame, cost retouching time that a five-minute wipe-down would have avoided.
Approvals: name the person, cap the rounds
Say who approves, and whether that person will be present. The worst post-shoot delays come from a contact sheet going to a committee that was never briefed on the goal. Name one approver, ideally present on the day for hero shots, and agree how many rounds of selection and retouch the fee covers. Professional practice is to put selection rounds in writing for exactly this reason, and the fee structure behind them is explained in the day rates and licensing article.
Deadline and delivery format
State the real deadline, not the polite one padded with a week, and the delivery format: full-resolution files, web-sized, or both, and in which colour space, which matters if anything goes to print. If a print run is scheduled, give the photographer the printer's specification; a CMYK conversion done blind by whoever is nearest the deadline is where expensive reprints come from.
What the brief does for the quote
A photographer quotes a vague brief with padding, because the risk of the unknown lands on them. The same job, briefed precisely, usually quotes leaner, because the day can be planned hour by hour instead of insured against. Writing a good brief is the cheapest discount available in commercial photography. It costs twenty minutes with a coffee and it routinely moves both the price and the outcome in your favour.