Three Easy Ways to Upgrade Your Zoom

Two years into the pandemic and I have come to the realization that there are some things that are here to stay.

One of those, for many of us, is working from home and making Zoom calls. These 3 easy steps will level up your Zoom calls and help you feel more comfortable, confident and, well, at home in your home office.

1. Clean Up the Background
2. Lights. Lights. Lights.
3. Upgrade Your Webcam

Don't believe me yet, well just look at the results...

1. Clean up the background

I get it, working from home is messy. I'm also buried under empty cans of Monster and Coke, and every couple of days I remember to take my lunch plate back upstairs. It happens. But, you can control what other people see, so control it!

I cleaned out my bookshelf and instead tried to focus on a couple of items on each shelf. I swapped out the photo on the wall to bring more color into the background, and then filled in the rest of the space with personal items so my interests and personality can come through. These can be great for conversation starters when you're on a call with someone you don't know well, and also help visually brand yourself.

I also made sure to keep a relatively open space for where my head will go. It doesn't need to be a bare wall, but make sure you don't have anything too distracting right behind your head.

You've got a tiny little zoom window in most calls, you want to make sure that your window looks like it's under control and is easily recognizable even if you're not in it.

2. Lights. Lights. Lights.

The single biggest separator between professional video production and amateur production is using, and controlling, lighting to set your scene. Relying only on natural lighting will make your camera work harder, adding noise and fuzziness to your image, ultimately making you look worse.

Traditionally, this has meant large and expensive lighting rigs to make sure cameras have plenty of light to work with. The good news is that cameras have gotten a lot better and don't (totally) require the blinding lights that are common on film and TV sets. Now you can set up an interesting lighting scene, at least one that works well for your Zoom calls, without buying a single piece of professional equipment.

I used a simple LED desk lamp that is directly in front of my face to provide a key light. I covered the lamp head with a couple layers of Press N' Seal to help diffuse the light so the shadows aren't as harsh. Diffusion spreads the light out, creating a softer glow, like the difference between laying on a rock (a flashlight beam) and a fluffy bed (a diffused LED array). My face looks (arguably) better with a fluffy bed than a rock.

Another option is to direct the lamp to the wall in front of you to use the wall as a reflector. If your wall is a dark color, a simple white poster board can act as a good reflector, too. Bouncing light off a reflector is another great way to diffuse that light so it's not so harsh. For me, it wasn't giving me enough light to combat the natural light coming from the window to create the scene I wanted.

If you do end up using something over your light for diffusion, just be sure the light is an LED bulb and doesn't produce heat. Speaking from years of personal experience with very hot TV lights, fires are bad. And hot lights can ignite things very quickly.

Lighting can also help paint the background to make it more interesting. The book shelf I had has a built in light. Lucky for me it still worked, even if it did smell like my Grandparents' house 30 years ago. This light helps pull items on the shelves out of the shadows to make it all more interesting. I've also played around with using various flashlights hidden on the shelves to light other items.

Now that I have my face lit, and have added texture to my bookshelf items, the final piece is to paint the background and provide a back light. Back lights help light your silhouette to pull you away from the background and create depth. In professional video production, the back light is a dedicated light and an integral part of three-point lighting. For Zoom I'm trying not to spend any money. A simple lamp can do wonders and achieve multiple objectives at once.

I used a warm colored lightbulb for this old lamp we had laying around to counter the blue, natural light coming in from the window. This warms up the background by adding a nice amber color to what is actually a depressingly grey wall. The lamp also provides a decent back light that doesn't exactly light my silhouette, but at least creates some depth between me and the back wall.

I cannot emphasize enough how much paying attention to, and working with lighting will help improve your video call quality. If you do nothing else, finding a good lighting setup will improve every other aspect of your Zoom call image.

3. Upgrade Your Camera

Even if you don't have an extra camera laying around to use, doing the first two steps will greatly improve your video overall. If you want to take it to the next level using an external camera, even if it's just a dedicated webcam, is a must.

To start, we want to control the angle of the camera. The angle you get from the built in camera sits below your eye line, and EVERYONE knows your Instagram selfie looks better when it's shot at an angle looking down at you.

Bringing the angle above your eye line, even if it's just slightly above, does a couple of things... one, it makes your face look larger than your body (yes, it's a slimming technique), but it ALSO makes sure the ceiling isn't in the shot.

Unless you're taking your zoom call in the Sistine Chapel, no one is excited to see your ceiling.

The second thing using an external camera does is it gives you a much better quality camera sensor. The internal camera on most laptops is usually worse than the camera on your cell phone. A nicer sensor will give you more leeway with light and you will get less noise in your shot. If you have access to something beyond a webcam you can also play with focus techniques to give your background a nice, natural blur.

After some very light searching, I found a simple tutorial to convert my Sony a6500 into a webcam. Seriously, it was a piece of cake. I downloaded the app from Sony's website, restarted my computer, made some minor changes in my camera menu, and connected the camera to my computer using a USB cable that supports data transfer. Instant upgrade.

I've also seen that Canon released a similar update for their camera systems. Either way, throw that up on a cheap tripod, jam it behind your desk, and you're good to go. I leave the autofocus on so it can follow focus if I lean in or out of frame, but you could also set your focus and put it on manual.

One last thing to remember is that depending on where you set your camera you might need to change where you look when you speak. You want to look into the camera. When that camera is part of your screen it's close enough for jazz. Putting the camera even just a couple of inches above your screen will dramatically change your eye line when speaking to people on Zoom. It takes a bit of practice, but after awhile it becomes much more natural to look into the camera while speaking.

Three easy steps to upgrade your home office Zoom calls to make you feel better about the fact you didn't get fully dressed for the day.

I know there's a lot of video professionals I'm connected with on LinkedIn, let me know what I forgot!

Cheers!