How to take FaceTime photo shoots

Hello fellow creatives, so here's how you do it...

It’s not complicated once you get the hang of it. It's been a case of trial and error for me.

Basically, I've done the research so you don't have to!

The creativity is through the direction, the unpredictability of it and finding the best light sources and interesting areas to capture. I also do quite a lot of editing to bring the final image to life.

I tried several different ways including shooting with my DSLR while FaceTiming through my iMac which I’m my opinion absolutely didn’t work, directing and mood boarding potential set ups before the shoot, directing through FaceTime then instructing self timer images, which was completely over complicated. Screen grabbing FaceTime stills which still looked pretty awful quality wise and then, with the help of an amazing community of photographers who as I do, believe in sharing knowledge and community over competition, I found the easiest way as follows:

iPhone or iMac on my end, iPhone on theirs, directly through FaceTime.

Before you shoot, your subjects will need an iPhone 6 or above and be running IOS 11 or later.

• They need to have FaceTime Live Photos enabled (Settings>FaceTime>Live Photos – toggle on)
• They need to have their phone set to upload photos to iCloud
• If they have to change any settings they’ll need to restart their device.

I shoot through FaceTime from my iMac or my iPhone. My subject is using an iPhone ideally, though an iPad can work it’s not as good image quality wise

• There is an onscreen button to take a photo, it takes a ‘Live’ photo which is basically a 3-second video that you can pull stills from (or export as a video, or even a GIF!).

Please note: This is not for everyone, the quality is no where near as good as a 'proper' photo shoot with a professional camera and a decent lens. The resulting images are not really suitable for printing but are great for social media content.

If you embrace the grain and it's temporary beauty, it is a lot of fun.