Ten mistakes people make filming themselves talking to camera

Somebody told you to start posting. You have spent years explaining difficult things to rooms full of people who were paying attention, and now a laptop on a desk is turning you into somebody you would not hire.

The natural conclusion is that you are bad at this. You are not. Almost everything wrong with that recording was settled by where the laptop sits, what is behind you and where the lamp is pointing, and all three were settled before you said a word.

The list runs to ten because the job is narrow: one person, at a desk, talking to a camera. Make the subject that specific and ten separate failures fit without padding, each with its own cause and its own fix. None of the ten is a purchase: each is a position, a habit or a phone you already own. The one thing worth buying comes later, and it is optional.

Ten things that go wrong at a desk

1. The lamp on the desk, pointing straight at your face

The light arrives, goes next to the laptop, points at you, and the result is flat, shadowless and faintly startled. Light from directly in front removes every shadow on a face, and shadow is the only thing telling a viewer what shape that face is. Slide the lamp off to one side and above your eyeline until one half of your face is plainly brighter than the other; "Where to put your light when you only have one" walks the whole arc.

2. Sitting with your back to a window

It feels like the courteous arrangement, facing into the room, and it is the one arrangement a camera cannot cope with. The camera exposes for the brightest thing in the frame, the window wins easily, and you become a dark shape in front of a bright rectangle. Turn the desk so the daylight is in front of you or off to one side, which costs nothing and is usually a better view; "Filming next to a window" deals with daylight that refuses to sit still.

3. The camera below eye level

A laptop sits on a desk, so its camera looks up at you, and looking up at somebody is the least flattering angle a lens has. It finds the underside of the chin, tips the room backwards, and makes an experienced person read as uncertain. Put the laptop on a stack of books until the lens sits at or a little above your eye level, then sit back rather than leaning in towards it.

4. Using the laptop microphone

It is buried in the body of the machine, under the keyboard, an arm's length away, next to a fan working hard precisely because you are recording video. A phone in your shirt pocket is closer to your mouth than that laptop will ever be, and the distance does more for your sound than any plugin you could buy. Record on the phone, clap once at the start so the two files line up later, and keep the laptop's audio as a backup; "How far should a microphone be from your mouth?" explains why distance beats everything else.

5. Sitting close to a bare wall

Two faults arrive together here and both get blamed on the camera. There is nothing behind you, so the picture flattens and reads as a corridor; and the wall returns your voice to the microphone almost as strongly as your mouth sends it, so the room ends up inside your words rather than behind them. Pull the chair forward, away from the wall, before you change anything else; "Background and atmosphere lights" handles the depth and "Why your video sounds echoey" handles the sound.

6. One take, and no alternative opening

Most people record once, reach the end and accept it, which means the whole video rests on a first sentence delivered before you had warmed up. Openings are the part everybody is worst at on the first attempt and best at on the third, and they also decide whether anybody stays for the rest. Record your opening two or three times, changing the first line each time, then film the body; "Film three hooks, not one" is about exactly this.

7. Reading from a script placed off to one side

Your eyes leave the lens, travel sideways and come back, then do it again a few words later. Nobody watching can name what is happening, everybody registers it, and it registers as evasiveness, which is an unfortunate thing to project while explaining your professional judgement. Cut the script down to prompts rather than sentences, stick them under the lens, and accept that you will say it slightly differently each time, which is generally an improvement.

8. One angle only

With a single camera there is nowhere to cut, so a stumble in the middle either stays in or costs you the entire take. A second angle, even a phone on a shelf pointing at you from the side, turns a fluffed sentence into a two-second cut nobody notices. A music education partnership added one on the speaker and the videos stopped sitting still; "How many cameras do you need?" gives the honest answer for a desk.

9. Filming a series in a different room each time

Each video is fine on its own. Watched as a set, which is how anybody who begins to trust you will watch them, they look like the work of several different people at several different firms. Choose the room, mark the chair position on the floor with tape, photograph the whole setup once, and use it every time; "Why wardrobe decides whether a series looks like one" makes the same argument about what you are wearing.

10. Spending the opening on your name, title and company

Nobody arrives at a video wanting the introduction. They arrived because something in the first few seconds suggested you were about to say a thing they needed, and your name is not that thing. Start on the subject itself and let your name turn up later, or leave it in the caption where it can be read at no cost to anybody; "How long is a hook?" covers what has to happen before that.

Which of the ten do you fix first?

Three, in this order, and they take one afternoon between them. Raise the camera to eye level. Turn the desk so the daylight is in front of you rather than behind. Record on your phone instead of the laptop.

Those three move more than the rest of the list combined, because they repair the framing, the exposure and the sound in a single sitting. After that, tape the floor where the chair goes, photograph the room, and stop re-deciding the arrangement every week.

The one thing worth buying, once the free changes are done, is something to soften the lamp you already own. Not a brighter lamp: a bigger, softer one, or the lamp you have moved closer and put behind something that spreads it. Hardness is set by how large the light looks from where your face is sitting, not by how bright it is, which is why a small bright lamp and a small dim one throw the same hard edge.

Is any of this actually about confidence?

No, and that is worth saying plainly, because the worry that brings people to a post like this is rarely a worry about cameras. It is the worry of putting something into the world with your name on it that looks less capable than you are.

What is on this list is furniture, geometry and a microphone. None of it is a verdict on you, and none of it improves with practice the way delivery does, because none of it is a skill. It is a set of positions. Set them once and you never think about them again.

Which leaves the actual work, which is the part you were already good at on the day somebody told you to start posting.