2020 was weird.
I was still living in Alaska, getting ready to move across the country to South Carolina, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, the world shut down.
For a photographer, that presented a pretty obvious problem: I could not exactly photograph people when I could not be in the same room as them.
So I started doing photoshoots over FaceTime.
My subject would prop up their phone, I would direct them from hundreds of miles away, and we would figure it out together. I would tell them where to stand, how to move, where to put the phone, which direction to face, how to use the light coming through their windows. Sometimes we would rearrange half a room trying to find the right angle.
And somehow, it worked.
Actually, it worked *really* well.
There was something completely different about these sessions. I had almost none of the control I normally had behind a camera. I could not adjust the light myself. I could not move two feet to the left to fix my composition. I could not reach for another lens.
All I had was my eye, my direction, their phone, and whatever was already around them.
It forced me to photograph differently.
And I loved it.
Looking back now, these images feel like a tiny time capsule. I was sitting in Alaska photographing people through a screen while packing up my own life and preparing to start over in South Carolina. None of us really knew what the next few months—or years—were going to look like.
But we were still making things.
These are some of my favorite photographs from that strange little chapter of my life.
**Shot via FaceTime, somewhere between Alaska and whatever came next.**
I was still living in Alaska, getting ready to move across the country to South Carolina, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, the world shut down.
For a photographer, that presented a pretty obvious problem: I could not exactly photograph people when I could not be in the same room as them.
So I started doing photoshoots over FaceTime.
My subject would prop up their phone, I would direct them from hundreds of miles away, and we would figure it out together. I would tell them where to stand, how to move, where to put the phone, which direction to face, how to use the light coming through their windows. Sometimes we would rearrange half a room trying to find the right angle.
And somehow, it worked.
Actually, it worked *really* well.
There was something completely different about these sessions. I had almost none of the control I normally had behind a camera. I could not adjust the light myself. I could not move two feet to the left to fix my composition. I could not reach for another lens.
All I had was my eye, my direction, their phone, and whatever was already around them.
It forced me to photograph differently.
And I loved it.
Looking back now, these images feel like a tiny time capsule. I was sitting in Alaska photographing people through a screen while packing up my own life and preparing to start over in South Carolina. None of us really knew what the next few months—or years—were going to look like.
But we were still making things.
These are some of my favorite photographs from that strange little chapter of my life.
**Shot via FaceTime, somewhere between Alaska and whatever came next.**
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