Chris Korsak

Portland Branding, headshot, and product photographer

Facetime portrait during the Covid-19 quarantine

FaceTime Photo Shoot: Madeline

May 1, 2020

Here’s some new work from my recent FaceTime photo shoot with my friend Madeline. In the last year, we’ve been collaborating on shoots every few months, so it was nice that quarantine didn’t stop us this time around. This was also my second shoot using FaceTime, and I’m starting to realize the opportunities and limitations when using this medium, which I’ll describe below.

Mood-Bored

One thing that really helps give a shoot a sense of direction is to create a Pinterest mood board beforehand. I’m a big fan of doing this whenever possible. It provides a jumping off point for lighting, attire, posing, and overall feel. I often reference a mood board during the actual shoot because I am prone to going on photographic tangents without one.

The look I was going for was “casually bored at home,” with plenty of natural light streaming in through windows and creating interesting shadow patterns. Here’s the Pinterest Board if you want to check out the inspiration.

Indoors

Here are some of my favorite photos we created during the indoor portion of our FaceTime photo shoot:

Facetime portrait during the Covid-19 quarantine Facetime portrait during the Covid-19 quarantine Facetime portrait during the Covid-19 quarantine Facetime portrait during the Covid-19 quarantine Facetime portrait during the Covid-19 quarantine Facetime portrait during the Covid-19 quarantine Facetime portrait during the Covid-19 quarantine Facetime portrait during the Covid-19 quarantine Facetime portrait during the Covid-19 quarantine

We were able to achieve quite a few looks fairly quickly because in addition to the Pinterest mood board, we also did a quick FaceTime conversation a few days prior to scout out a few shoot locations in her house.

Outdoors

I wasn’t sure if using FaceTime outside would work or not because in order to do a shoot like this, you need a pretty solid internet connection. It turns out that even if the video quality degrades and looks really pixelated during a video chat, you are still able to take decent quality screen captures. Sometimes the screen captures took a while to appear on my computer, but the setup worked well even outdoors.

And not to go down a photographer-technical-talk-rabbit-hole, but generally speaking, image quality is not the greatest with FaceTime, no matter what your internet connection is. But that’s not really the point here, is it? I just keep thinking, would I rather have high-resolution photos of nothing, or decent quality images that actually make me happy because I had a lot of fun creating them?

Here are a few of my favorite photos from the outdoor portion of our FaceTime shoot:

Facetime portrait during the Covid-19 quarantine Facetime portrait during the Covid-19 quarantine Facetime portrait during the Covid-19 quarantine

One “opportunity” of shooting this way is the fact that a phone will almost always be positioned in a perspective that isn’t the norm. It’s kind of difficult to rig up a phone to be stationary, so it ends up in strange locations, positions, and angles, which end up being more unique. In the middle photo above, you are viewing the scene from the perspective of the backyard lawn. Pretty cool!

Conclusion

After doing a couple FaceTime shoots, I can honestly say I’m having fun with this way of creating photos. There are definite trade-offs, but there always are with photography. I would much rather create photos with a phone than create nothing at all. Can you even imagine trying to explain the concept of “remote portrait shoots with a smartphone” to someone a hundred years ago? It’s like the Jetsons…..except there’s a pandemic.

It was great to collaborate again with Madeline on another shoot. We always have a great time creating photos, and I’m proud that we’ve been able to continue pushing our creativity each time we work together.

-Chris