- Looking good on Zoom comes
down to three simple steps, light up your face, find
a flattering camera angle, and pay attention to your background. With these simple tips, you're going to be looking better on Zoom as a presenter and a teacher,
and as a participant. I'm Marcia Chadly from
the Creative Life Center, and I enjoy helping you
know how to use Zoom and feel comfortable with it. Let's explore how you
can adjust your setup so that you feel great and
you're looking good on Zoom. The very first step in making your Zoom appearance look better is to be able to see your
face, to light up your face. Here's an example of a situation that does not light up your face. If you have the most light
coming from behind you, whether it's from a window or a light, you're going to be in the shadows, your face is going to be shadowed. People can't see you.They
can't connect with you. They aren't seeing your eyes. It can get so bad that you're
just a black silhouette with a bright light behind you. So that's what you want
to avoid at all costs. You really don't want the
most light in the room to be behind you. With the light in front of
me, you can see my face. The window in front of my
computer is lighting up my face. You might have a window
in front of your computer, or maybe you use a desk lamp
or table lamp or floor lamp, some other kind of lighting. Just the whole idea is that you put the most
light in front of you so that people can see your face. That's step one. Step two is to find a
flattering camera angle. Here's the first hint, this is not it. When I have my laptop, my camera
down lower than eye level, I'm looking down, that means my camera
is basically looking up my nose. I see this angle a lot. It'd be really simple to
put your laptop in your lap or down low in front of
you, look down at it, but it's not a flattering angle. The best angle is to have your camera just a little bit above eye
level so you're looking up. Let me show you the difference that makes. This is the camera angle
that I most often use. The camera's sitting a little
bit above my eye level, so I'm looking slightly up, and I've done that by raising
my laptop off of the desktop by about six inches. Play around with the
height of your laptop, with the height of your web camera so that it's just above your eye level. You can set books or boxes
underneath your laptop, or even a computer stand. Try different things, experiment
so that you like the angle. The other thing that you can adjust is how close or how far
you are from the camera. Are you way back here? Is this the kind of shot you would like? Would you like something really close? You can also move your
computer up and down to get things exactly
where you're comfortable. Step three is to look at your background. What is it that might be
drawing focus away from you? Because we're trying to get people to be concentrating at us
and what we're presenting. First thing I see when I
look at this background are the three paintings
behind me with their eyes. Eyes attract attention. I want people to be looking
at my eyes, not theirs. So I'm going to take the
paintings down for my video. Let me show you. Now as I look around, I
notice a bit of a mess, there's some things on the
table on one side of me, there's a whole lot of things on the table on the other side of me. So I want to take care of that. I can clean off the table
to my left, that's easy. My project table, I like to
kind of "keep in action". I have a folding screen that I can use to easily hide what's there,
and simplify my background. Now I see the door. I don't really want that in there either, I'd like to simplify things even more. So I'm going to move my computer around to move that door out of the camera. I often do Zoom calls like this,
I even do videos like this. There are times when
I'd like the background to be even more simple, when I really want to make sure that people are focusing on me, then I use both of the
folding screens I have, and put them directly behind me. I'll show you what that looks like. Now I have a really simple background, and the focus is definitely on me. Sometimes I'll put a small
plant stand or table behind me with a plant on it to soften things up and
bring a bit of color. You can get this same effect by clearing some furniture
away from a wall, and putting a plant or
something simple beside you. For more ways to have your next Zoom call be more successful and easier, I invite you to our five day challenge, Five Keys to a Stellar Zoom Event. It's free, and all the details
are in the video description. Now it's time for you to
have fun adjusting your setup so that you feel great and
you're looking good on Zoom.
