Shoot Planner — AI Skill for Photographers

A shoot doesn't go wrong at the shoot. It goes wrong the night before.

Someone asks for “just a few family photos” and forty minutes evaporate while an aunt is located. The light you planned the whole day around is gone by the time the ceremony overruns. Nobody wrote down that the grandmother matters most, so there's no photograph of her.

Experienced photographers don't shoot better under that pressure. They've simply removed the pressure in advance: a timeline built backward from sunset, a shot list that includes the things everyone forgets, and a family list the client filled in themselves.

Two lines of brief in, a print-ready call sheet out. Then you spend five minutes debriefing the shoot, and every call sheet after that runs on your measured timings instead of the book's.

One skill. Six jobs.

Plan the whole shoot

Tiered shot list, gear from your actual kit, a rain plan with a decision deadline, and safety notes where the location earns them. Weddings, elopements, couples, family, brand — plus newborn, event and real estate.

› Plan my shoot: [type, date, location, priorities].

Just the timeline

Built backward from the sunset time you give it, with buffers where they belong. In the demo, a 5:47pm sunset plants the couple's portraits at 4:45 and puts the location move on its own row.

› Just the timeline — ceremony at 4, sunset at 7:12.

The genres without a golden hour

A newborn session is anchored to feeds and sleep, and the safety rules go onto the call sheet word for word. An event runs off the client's run sheet. A property run is set by which way the façade faces.

› Newborn session Thursday — she's 9 days old, home studio.

Debrief the shoot you just did

Five minutes: what actually started when, what ran over, what got cut. It computes the variance and logs it. At three shoots of a type it writes your median buffers into your profile and uses them from then on.

› Debrief yesterday's wedding.

Prep the whole season

Edit debt as arithmetic. Four galleries pending at 24 edit hours each, against 12 genuinely available editing hours a week, is eight weeks of work. That's how a four-week delivery promise breaks before the season starts.

› Season prep — eight shoots between March and May.

Pose people who hate posing

Verbal prompts rather than poses: “walk toward me and tell him the worst joke you know.” Movement beats mannequins, every time.

› They're stiff and nervous. Give me prompts.

A call sheet you can print and hold.

It leaves as a file by default, because nobody scrolls a chat log at a wedding:

The print-ready call sheet, timed to the minute
Shot list in three tiers, costed against the blocks it has to fit
The one-page assistant sheet, with the block-by-block coverage split
The family formals list, for the client to fill in
Your shoot debrief, plus the running timing log it appends to
The season plan: backlog, collisions, and who covers the Saturday you're ill

Why not just ask the chatbot?

The timeline is anchored to real light

It works backward from your sunset time with named buffers, then prices the shot list against the blocks before you ever see it. Twenty guests each posed with the couple is 65 minutes of work inside a 20-minute block, and that gets fixed on paper rather than at golden hour.

It never invents a sunset time

Sunset, tide, permits and venue rules are things it cannot know. Each one becomes a marked verify-item, because a wrong assumption at golden hour costs you the shot.

It gets better every shoot

The buffers start as the playbook's directional norms. Once three shoots of a type are logged, your sheets read “move buffer 20 min (your measured median across 4 shoots, not the book's 15).” Median, so one catastrophic Saturday doesn't reset the system.

Your first five minutes.

Install it, then type any of these. No prompt-writing, no setup screens.

1Plan my shoot: [type, date, location, priorities].
2Just the timeline — ceremony at 4, sunset at 7:12.
3Newborn session Thursday. She's 9 days old.
4Debrief yesterday's shoot, then prep my season.
5demo — watch it plan a cliffside elopement.

Plug and play

From download to done in three steps.

Buy & download

A skill folder and a one-page install guide. Claude and ChatGPT are both included.

ii.

Drop it in

About a minute, once. Then fill your profile — the same one every skill in the suite reads.

iii.

Just talk

Paste the job in front of you — an email, a brief, a spreadsheet. It runs the whole workflow and hands back a finished file.

What it won't do.

Every skill in the store ships with this section. If a tool won't tell you its limits, it's selling you something.

It plans the day; it can't scout the location or control the weather. Every outdoor anchor carries a named plan B and a decision deadline.
It never invents sunset times, tide times, permit rules or venue restrictions. Anything it can't verify is marked for you to confirm.
The newborn safety rules go on every newborn call sheet, but reading them is not the same as being trained by a working newborn photographer. The skill says so rather than implying otherwise.

Questions.

What exactly is an AI skill?

A small file you add to Claude or ChatGPT once. It teaches the AI you already use this specific professional workflow — so from then on, one sentence runs the whole job. No prompt writing, no new app to learn. You buy it once, download it, and it's yours. It runs inside the Claude or ChatGPT account you already have; the free tiers work too.

How is this different from just asking Claude or ChatGPT?

A chatbot writes a plausible schedule. The Shoot Planner builds the timeline backward from your actual sunset time with named buffers, tests whether the shot list fits the blocks it sits in, pulls gear from the kit in your profile, and refuses to state a sunset time, tide time or permit rule it can't verify.

I don't shoot weddings. Is it still useful?

Yes. It plans portraits, family sessions, elopements, brand work, newborn sessions, events and corporate days, and real-estate listings. Each genre gets its own timeline anchor: feeds and sleep for a newborn, the client's run sheet for an event, the direction the façade faces for a property. The wedding day is one branch, not the whole skill.

What does the debrief actually do?

It takes five minutes after a shoot, computes how far each block ran from plan, and appends a row to your running timing log. At three or more shoots of that type it writes the median variance into your profile as your buffer, and every later call sheet uses your number instead of the book's. Below three shoots it keeps the default and tells you how many more it needs.

Can I give it to my second shooter?

That's what the assistant sheet is for: a stripped one-page version with their timings and their shots. It now carries the block-by-block coverage split, the three frames that are theirs alone, and the items that have to be agreed in writing before the day — call and finish times, whose gear, where the cards go at the end of the night, rate, and portfolio rights.

Is it a subscription?

No. $19 once, yours to keep, updates included.

Every shoot, planned like your hundredth wedding.