We Spent a Year Timing Our Own Shoots. Here Is the Tool That Came Out of It.

Every brand asks the same question before booking: how many images can we get in a day? The honest answer has always been "it depends," which doesn't help anyone build a budget.

So we started writing it down. For the past year, we documented our own shoots. Which styles we were building. How long each set took to light and dress. How many products moved through it. How many finished images came out the other side. Patterns show up when you have a year of that. Products on white behave nothing like a built lifestyle set. A pour is not a package hero. Prepared dishes carry their prep with them, and the number of people approving on the day changes the count more than almost anything else.

We turned those patterns into the CPG Photo Shoot Planner. You tell it what you are shooting, which styles you want, what condition your product is in, and who is approving on the day. It gives you a realistic range of finished images per day and an honest day count, and you can download the whole thing as a one-page plan or send it to us.

It's really for building libraries. Most brands do not need one photograph. They need a quarter year of assets that match each other across a website, ecommerce listings, email, social, and paid advertising. Planning the flow of styles up front is what turns that into one content sprint instead of five separate shoots, and it works the same way for a founder with four SKUs as it does for a national brand with forty.

One thing the planner will never do is promise you something a camera cannot make. Every number in it assumes real product, real food, and real light, because that is what still earns trust with a customer.

Try the CPG Photo Shoot Planner

Judy Doherty, MPS, PCII

Examples from our new shot planner.