The light goes up before the camera comes out.

Clients ask what camera I shoot on. Wrong question. The camera is the last thing I set up.

On interview days my tripod stays folded for the first twenty minutes. I walk the room instead. I'm looking at the windows, the ceiling lights, and the chair, because where the person sits matters more than what I shoot them with.

A four-thousand-dollar camera in bad light produces a four-hundred-dollar video. A phone in good light produces something a client is happy to post. The gap between professional and amateur footage is almost never the camera. It is that someone decided what the light should do before pressing record.

Kill the overheads first

Office ceiling lights are the enemy. Fluorescents paint everything green, and mixed with window daylight they give skin two color temperatures at once. First move: turn them off. If the room goes dark, good. Now I control it. One law office in King of Prussia went from a green cave to a clean interview with that single switch.

One key light, 45 degrees off the lens

The key goes about 45 degrees to the side of the lens axis, a little above eye level, through diffusion. A shower curtain works. A twenty-five-dollar 5-in-1 reflector bounced against a window works. The point is soft light from one direction, with the far side of the face falling off naturally. That is the whole recipe. Everything after this is garnish.

Mind the background

The background tells the story, but it has to sit a stop or two darker than the face. If the window behind them is blown out, the camera exposes for the window and the face goes dark. Turn them, move them, or close the blinds halfway. And pull the chair six feet off the wall. Distance plus a soft background reads as expensive. A chair against a wall reads as a deposition.

Window light is free, and it moves

A big north-facing window is the best key light ever made, and it costs nothing. But it drifts. A twenty-minute interview is fine. A half-day shoot means re-exposing every hour as the sun moves. My LED panel does not drift. Trade-offs, always trade-offs. I pick the window when I can watch it, the panel when I can't.

Exposure is a decision, not a setting

Once the light is set, lock the exposure manually. Auto exposure breathes every time the person leans forward or a cloud passes, and that pulsing brightness screams amateur. Pick the exposure for the face, lock it, and don't touch it for the whole interview. Modern cameras have zebras for a reason: set them around seventy percent and keep the stripes off the forehead. Ten seconds of discipline, and the footage holds still the whole way through.

So no, I don't lead with the camera. Ask me what I shoot on and I'll answer, but it's the least interesting part of the setup. Get the light right and the camera barely matters. Get it wrong and no camera saves you.