Access iOS Front Camera in Photo Mode - Not Video - a la Camera App

Hi,

As I understand it, the cameras on the iOS devices operate in 2 modes: still or photo mode and video mode. The resolutions of these 2 modes are different, often significantly. In my project, I am trying to access the Front or selfie camera in still mode, but I keep getting video mode.

Ideally, I would like my app to function the same way the built-in Camera app works - you see yourself in video (1280x720 on my iPad Mini Retina) for composing purposes, but when you hit the shutter button, it captures the image in still mode (1280x960).

I understand that iOS camera access is done through the WebCamTexture, but when I create one of these for the Front camera, even with very large requested resolution, I always get video 1280x720.

Further, it's hard to tell quite what the relationship is between the video images and the still images from the Front camera. It looks as though the video images are slightly cropped relative to the stills, and scaled down in one direction only relative to the stills. So, even a last-ditch resort of using the video image and somehow trying to reconstitute the still resolution doesn't seem easy.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: After more testing, it looks like the 1280x720 video frame is a direct center-crop (120 pixels on each side) of the 960-dimension. I'd still like to know if there's a way to access the full 1280x960 image that the sensor chip is capable of.

Thanks, Clay Budin NYC