If you want to use your ring light, then be sure to use background lights that have the intensity to blow out the shadows directly behind you so that it doesn’t mess with Zoom doing it’s job with the virtual background. If you cross-light yourself and adjust the height of each light on the stand, that gives you the chance to move your shadows off of the background that Zoom doesn’t see, which will go a long way to keeping the virtual background clean. You know all those ring lights you people like so much? Well, this light is problematic for virtual backgrounds because the shadow created by that light goes DIRECTLY BEHIND YOU, which causes all sorts of problems for Zoom.Īll lights creates shadows, that’s just science, but you do have the ability to tuck these shadows out of sight from the camera with a little maneuvering and adjustment - provided you don’t simply use a ring light. Why?”ĩ.9 times out of 10, it’s because they have a shadow of themselves popping onto the background and their background lights aren’t strong enough to wash it out. I use separate lights for the background and myself, and yet, it still looks wonky. I’ve had some clients remark, “well, I have the green screen. 3 - Be mindful of your shadow on the background Yup, it’s tricky, but once you get the hang of it, you’re good to go moving forward. The goal is to have every part of your background evenly lit with the same intensity, so that’s why multiple lights are suggested to do this. You want to help Zoom out as much as possible for it to know which parts of the frame need to be replaced by your virtual background, and if part of the wall is darker than other parts, that’s when bad shit starts to happen to the look of your shot. Simple, right?īut, you also need to do the same thing to the background, whether a green screen or a solid wall. One of the best ways is through cross lighting - placing one light to the left and the other to the right at about a 45 degree angle from the camera. Most people have the lighting themselves part down, and there are several ways to achieve this. You need to light yourself separately from the wall. If you want to create a clean and even virtual background with no visual hiccups, the key is lighting. While most people are on the same page with tip #1, lighting is where things start to fall apart. 2 - Light yourself separately from the background If you post up in front of a background with a million different colors and patterns, that will make life harder for Zoom to create a solid virtual background and that’s when you start to look like Caspar the friendly ghost. Now if you don’t have a green screen, you can also get away with using a solid wall as your background before you flip the virtual background switch in Zoom. As a result, it’s easier for Zoom to know that wherever that color shows up in the frame, it will be replaced by the image you want to use as your background. The reason why “green screens” are that color is because that shade of green is rarely seen anywhere else in life. 1 - Make sure that your background is a solid color that you’re not wearing. If you still want to move ahead and use virtual backgrounds, here are a couple tips to keep in mind when staging and lighting for this look. And when they’re done looking like ghosts, their body movement often reveals what’s going on in the backgrounds of the space in which they’re broadcasting.įolks - please stop allowing for crappy production quality, will ya? The speakers look like apparitions disappearing and reappearing the moment they move around and talk. If you don’t properly light and stage for a virtual setup, it’s going to, in most cases, look like total and complete dog shit.Īnd anyone who has ever attended a virtual event knows exactly what I’m talking about. Quite frankly, I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve shot speakers on virtual backgrounds where the look was seamless. While leveraging a virtual background is as simple as hitting a button, making it look good isn’t quite so automatic. Like many of these conferences that I’ve photographed over the past year, they opted to use a consistent, virtual background for each of the presenters.Īnd, much to my dismay, every single one of the presenters looked mehhh when they enabled this background. I was shooting a virtual conference earlier this week that involved a slew of virtual speakers from all over the country.
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