On an actual on-topic note for the Boing Boing Store posts, I wish I’d seen that ring light a couple weeks ago, before I bought some “vlogger lights” from Amazon.
Here’s a note to everyone speaking on Zoom meetings: Lighting Matters. Half of my team looks like Gollum, lurking in the shadows. The other half are lit by random sources, like room lights, desk lamps, screen glow, back lit by windows, etc. Even when they have enough light the colors are generally awful, having first bounced off of beige walls.
As I’m normally ugly as a troll even in the daylight, I’m not one for staring at myself in the mirror, so I hadn’t noticed it before. But one day I had my magnetic LED bar flashlight/worklight charging on my desk and I turned it on, and wow! my image improved so much I couldn’t believe it. Being a worklight (I bought it to fix plumbing under my sink) the colors were slightly off, but it made all the difference. So I bought a pair of bi-color “vlogger” lights, tuned the colors so I didn’t look gray, and dang, did the video improve!
If you want to improve your Zoom image, I highly recommend spending a few minutes on fixing your lighting. If you have a lighted makeup mirror, try that (adjusting the colors if you can.) If you can’t make it work with your existing home lamps, that ring light looks like a great, cheap-enough solution that will provide a flat, even lighting source. As a bonus, that ring light is cheaper than even one of those vlogger lights I bought.
