ZOOM LIGHTING HACKS

This is my

lighting

of choice for

zoom

streaming webinars whenever I need to be online and it doesn't cost any money without studio lights, it's easy if you understand some basic principles of cinematography and what not to do for example. I actually watch this one frequently on

zoom

, so this is the situation where I have a dead eye. There are other problems with this

lighting

setup as well, but we'll get to that in a second. Both eyes should catch the light. That's why photographers use something like this, but look, you don't. If you need fancy stuff, you can emulate the look of professional tools if you understand what those tools are trying to accomplish, so let's do a little crash course in cinematography because we need to understand what these tools are and how they work before we try to emulate them. things we have in the house, so in the studio, which is also my living room, I use daylight colored lights, one on each side of me, but let's talk about the one on my right first, so this is my brighter light and also has a modifier activated. it has a softbox, the modifiers are meant to diffuse the light, concentrated light tends to create pretty aggressive shadows, so this is what it looks like if I remove the softbox with just this light, okay, the softbox It's back on, but there's still a problem.

There are a lot of shadows on this side of my face, even if the shadows are not as harsh as before. So how are we going to fix this? We have two ways to do it. We could put a second light in here for me to take care of. the shadow or we could move this light right in front of my face, okay, so the light is right in front of my face, look other than it blinds me. A second problem with this is that it makes the image look very flat because I can't look. the camera, a light in front of my face is bad because it eliminates too many shadows.

People think that shadows are the enemy and they definitely are when you have an overhead light like that. I think this in Zoom is also the undefined overhead light. ' worn and on the top of my head, but keeping shadows subtle gives dimension to your face in terms of the type of shadows we're looking for, we want them to be soft and we want them to be in flattering places, so it's not this, ah, instead of what we want is we want some highlights on my eyes, on my cheeks, on my forehead and then we want enough soft shadows to show some dimensionality on my face.

There should be no clear line from where the highlight ends and the shadow begins, and this is called high light dimming and to get the highlights and shadows that we want, we will need more than one light, so here is the single light, we have some nice lights but we have too much shadow so let's fix that with a second light to my left much better now I also have a third light above me and that's a window to my right so what this window is doing is creating a highlight here on my shoulder and it's highlighting my hair now the transition from highlight to shadow is really subtle because the window has a screen that makes the light soft and diffuse.

Check out what it looks like if I have the blinds up now. Lighting is all about balance. I could try to counteract these hot reflections coming in with my There are two other studio lights, but you can see they're not really compatible with the sun, I mean, fair, so I'm going to go ahead and shield that window excellently, so, Aside from lights and shadows creating flattering lighting, it also creates more flattering lighting. dimensional image, so this is a second reason why we wouldn't put a single light shining directly in my face because highlights and shadows are really critical to making what is a 2D medium look 3D, which is also why a light from background or how I am.

Using a side light in the window is so important that it highlights them from the background, so the lighting setup that I just described and that I use here in the studio is a three point lighting system and if that sounds familiar it's because many cinematographers Use it, it consists of a key light on one side, your brightest light, a fill light on the other to take care of some of that shadow but not too much so you still get some shadow to get some dimension and then a backlight to Take out the subject now, it is worth mentioning that both lights are diffuse.

I'm using a softbox and an umbrella and the reason is that I don't get hard shadows, we need diffusion to create that nice lighting. but you don't need any studio equipment, in fact this setup, my typical zoom setup doesn't use any CEO equipment, so let's take everything we've learned and figure out how we can rebuild this from the ground up using only what you have. around the house, okay, let's complete this, all the lights are off. I'm sitting in front of a window without a mesh, one problem here is that there is too much contrast. I'm too bright in the background, it's too dark and I see this problem developing.

All the time the contrast problem is too severe, like having too much light on one side of your face or having too much light behind you. I recommend sitting in front of a window, not having it next to you, definitely not having it behind your back. because it is so bright that it will be difficult to balance such a large fan of natural light, but if you are really close to a window that needs to be protected, much better the contrast problem is already being solved, although the image is still quite dark. and I'm quite blue because my curtains now we added a key and a film and here are the two that I chose, they will both give off a soft light, one of them has a lampshade, the other has exposed bulbs, but this particular light has a very low power, so it will admit soft light because they are designed to have no shadow.

Great, now I purposely wore a dark suit so you can see how easy it is for me to blend into the background. I want that depth so we'll need a backlight, it will separate me from the background but also add some interest. Well, I think this looks great, but the background is still a little darker than I want and that's it. because it's a cloudy day and we're not getting much ambient light from the window to illuminate this background, so I'm going to go ahead and turn on the overhead light, you know how I feel about that, but the overhead light is behind. me and it's not right above my head, so it won't create those unflattering shadows that I hate so much.

This looks pretty good. I think the only way we can improve it is if my face was a little brighter. I have three monitors. I have three monitors and use them as a light source, and you can see the huge impact they have on the lighting. I usually put them in a kind of soft yellow and you can do this very easily by just opening a Word document. and changing the color of the paper all this time. I didn't know you could do this, but you just go to the layout and then the page color and choose, so this is what it looks like with just my laptop screen, so you don't need to do that. have a triple monitor setup to make this look really pretty.

Final tip and this is for any time you are live online make sure you stream at the highest resolution your internet can support and if you are using zoom there is an airbrushing option just go to settings here and then to video and there you can also enable HD. This is a brand new channel and I'm still deciding what it is about, but I think it's about how to optimize your web presence. I'm a marketing professor, but I'm also a big plant-based baking enthusiast, so I put a button here in the corner, so I put a one-click subscribe button here in the corner.

I get so excited every time I get a new subscriber because I have two videos and I like 30 subscribers, so while you're thinking about it, enjoy my fear of bounce boards, usually what you would use is something like this, this is a bounce board, so by the way, I bought this studio. for about $130 on Amazon, so, you know, it doesn't even have to cost much if you want to make this a hobby. I have the link below. It is not a filius as if there were no compensation. Just I like it. I think the set has a great quality-price ratio.

I don't really need to wear an apron for this.