How to Light Yourself for Vertical Video

Lighting is the difference between a clip that looks like it was shot by a professional and one that looks like it was shot in a hallway. It is also the cheapest thing on the list to fix: a window and a white wall will do most of the work, and the mistakes that ruin footage are mostly about where the light is rather than how much of it there is.

The goal is simple to state. One side of the face is lit, the other side is not in darkness, the eyes have a small catch of light, and the background is darker than the face so the face separates from it. Get those four things and nothing else matters much.

Start with the window, not with gear

If you have a window, you have a key light, and it is a large soft one — which is exactly what most cheap lighting kits are trying to imitate. Stand facing it, three-quarters on, so the light falls across one cheek and leaves a gentle shadow on the other side.

Three rules for using a window:

• Never sit with the window behind you. This is the single most common failure. The camera exposes for the bright window, the face goes dark, and no amount of editing recovers it.
• Back away from the glass. Close to a window, the light is intense and the falloff is steep. A metre or two back gives a softer, more even result.
• Diffuse it if it is direct sun. A sheer curtain is a diffuser. Direct sun on a face produces hard shadows that read as harsh on camera.

If the only window is behind you, turn the whole setup around and shoot the other way, even if the background is worse. A well-lit face against a plain wall beats a nicely decorated background with a silhouette in front of it.

If you need a light, buy one and place it properly

A single LED panel with a diffuser is enough. Do not buy three.

• Position it 45 degrees to one side of your face, and slightly above eye level. Higher than that and the eye sockets go dark; level with the face and the lighting reads as flat and clinical.
• Bring it close and turn it down rather than putting it far away and turning it up. A large source close to the face is soft; a small source far away is harsh, even at the same brightness on the subject.
• Do not point it at the ceiling and hope. Bounced light is beautifully soft but loses most of its strength; useful in a small white room, useless in a dark one.

That placement — one source, 45 degrees, slightly high — is the whole of "professional lighting" for a talking head in a vertical frame.

Fill is what stops the dark half looking broken

A single light leaves one side of the face in shadow. That is good; a completely flat face looks like a passport photo. What you do not want is a hard black edge where the shadow falls off completely.

The cheapest fill in existence is a white wall, a white sheet of foam board, or a sheet of paper on a stand, placed on the unlit side and angled toward the face. It bounces a little light back into the shadow. It costs nothing and it is the difference between "lit" and "sculpted".

A second light works too, but set it noticeably dimmer than the key. Two equal lights from opposite sides cancel the shape out and produce the flat look people associate with bad studio setups.

Separate the face from the background

In a vertical frame the background fills most of the picture, so a background the same brightness as the face flattens the whole image. Two options, in order of preference:

1. Make the background darker than the face. Turn off the room lights behind you, close the curtains, point nothing at the back wall.
2. Add a small light on the background, if the room is unavoidably bright, so the separation comes from colour rather than brightness.

Distance helps as well: standing a couple of metres in front of the wall rather than against it means the wall falls darker and softer, and the shadow you cast lands out of frame instead of behind your head.

Do not mix colour temperatures

Daylight from a window is blue-ish. Most room bulbs are orange-ish. Put both on a face and one side goes warm while the other goes cold, which the eye forgives and the camera does not.

Either shut the room lights off and use only the window, or close the curtain and use only the artificial light. If you must mix, put a corrective gel on the artificial source so it matches the window — or set the phone's white balance manually to whichever source is dominant and accept a slight cast on the other side.

Lock exposure before you record

Phone cameras re-meter constantly. Wave a hand, lean forward, and the exposure shifts mid-sentence, which is visible as a pulse in the finished clip and impossible to remove afterwards.

So, with the face lit and framed:

• Tap and hold on the face until the focus/exposure lock engages.
• Drag the exposure slider down slightly until the brightest part of the face is not clipping. Skin that has gone pure white has no detail left to recover.
• If your camera app shows a highlight warning or zebras, use it: anything flashing is information you have lost.

Locking exposure is worth more than any lighting upgrade, because it also fixes the pulsing.

The four mistakes that account for most bad footage

1. Window behind the subject. Covered above, and still the most common.
2. Overhead light only. Ceiling lights put the eyes in shadow and the forehead in highlight — the raccoon look.
3. A ring light straight on the face. Even, shadowless, and identifiable at a glance as a webcam setup. Move it off-axis.
4. The brightest thing in frame is not the face. A lamp, a monitor, a white shirt. The viewer's eye goes to the brightest area, so make that the face.

Rooms that fight you

• A dark room with one warm bulb. Add the brightest window you can find, or a single LED panel at 45 degrees, and turn the bulb off.
• A room with fluorescent strips. These flicker at mains frequency and can produce rolling bands on video. Change the shutter speed if your app allows it, or use daylight instead.
• A room with no window and no lamp. A phone screen is a light source: prop a second phone with a white screen facing you as a fill. It is not good, but it is better than nothing.

Quick checklist before every take

• Light comes from one side, slightly above eye level.
• Nothing bright is behind the subject.
• The shadow side is soft, not black.
• Background is darker than the face.
• One colour temperature only.
• Exposure and focus locked on the face.

That is a two-minute setup once you have done it a few times, and it is the part of the picture that viewers judge before they judge the edit. Once the footage looks right, the caption and framing decisions in our guide to vertical safe zones are what keep it readable on a phone.