If you’re looking for a quick guide to capturing reaction faces for your thumbnail shoot, here’s a simple process to follow:
1. Allocate Time: Plan for about 1 hour per unique outfit for your thumbnail shoot. It shouldn’t take much longer than this.
2. Background: Use a white background or a greenscreen, as you’ll likely remove the background later with editing tools.
3. Lighting: Make sure your face is evenly lit to make the editing process easier.
4. Organize Emotions: Use a board to label each emotion you're about to photograph. Take a picture of the label before each set of emotion shots to help with organizing your pictures later.
5. Variety: Take multiple pictures for each emotion to have a good selection.
6. Angles: Capture frontal shots as well as both right and left side angles.
7. Outfits: Change into different outfits, but definitely use a simple T-shirt for one of the outfits since they’re easiest to photoshop
8. Upload: Organize your photos into separate folders on Google Drive, which you can then share with your thumbnail designer.
It’s not uncommon to end up with around 2,000 pictures per outfit if you want to avoid repeating the thumbnail shoot in the near future.