This paper gives a review on three illumination issues of face tracking on smart phones: dark scenes, sudden lighting change and backlit effect. First, we propose a fast and robust face tracking method utilizing continuous adaptive mean shift algorithm (CAMSHIFT) and CbCr skin locus. Initially, the skin locus obtained from training video data. After that, a modified CAMSHIFT version based on the skin locus is accordingly provided. Second, we suggest an enhancement method to increase the chance of detecting faces, an important initialization step for face tracking, under dark illumination. The proposed method works comparably with traditional CAMSHIFT or particle filter, and outperforms these methods when dealing with our public video data with the three illumination issues mentioned above.