Filming yourself on a phone in a shop, workshop or clinic

Face a window, put the phone at eye height about an arm’s length away, and keep the microphone within a metre of your mouth. Those three decisions fix most of what makes a phone video look amateur, and none of them costs anything. Everything below is detail on those three.

Light: face the window, do not stand in front of it

A phone camera exposes for the brightest thing it can see. Stand with a window behind you and the phone exposes for the window, which turns you into a silhouette. Turn around so the window is in front of you and the same window becomes a large, soft, free light source pointing at your face.

Overhead lights alone are the other common problem. A downlight directly above puts shadows in your eye sockets and under your nose. If the room only has downlights, stand where something bright is in front of you, even a white wall catching daylight.

Sound: the microphone is the thing people actually judge

Viewers forgive a soft picture and leave immediately over bad audio. The phone’s microphone is decent within about a metre and poor beyond it, because at distance it picks up as much room as voice. The fix is distance, not equipment.

A workshop or a shop has a second problem: hard surfaces. Concrete, tile and roller doors reflect sound and make a voice echo. If your video sounds hollow, move somewhere with more soft material in it, or stand closer to a wall of stock rather than in the middle of an empty space. Filming with a fridge, compressor or fan running is worth a minute of turning it off first, because that hum cannot be removed later.

Where to put the phone

Eye height, roughly an arm’s length away, lens level with your eyes. Low-angle phone video looks unflattering and slightly aggressive, and holding the phone at chest height is the most common cause.

Anything that holds the phone steady beats holding it. A small tripod costs very little, but a stack of boxes, a shelf or a ute tailgate all work. Handheld footage of somebody talking is the clearest tell that a video was made in a hurry, and it is also tiring to watch.

Frame yourself with your head near the top of the picture and your upper chest at the bottom. Leave a small gap above your head, not a large one: a common mistake is standing too far back, which makes you small in frame and puts your face further from the microphone at the same time.

Where to look

At the lens, not at yourself. The preview of your own face is the strongest possible distraction and it pulls your eyes several degrees off camera, which reads to a viewer as not quite meeting their eye. On an iPhone, the front camera is the small dark circle at the top of the screen, and looking there is what makes the video feel like it is addressed to somebody.

This is also why the position of any script matters. Notes on a second phone beside the first, or text low on the screen, moves your eye line off the lens for the whole take. Text immediately below the camera keeps it within a couple of degrees, which nobody notices.

What is not worth buying yet

Ring lights, lapel microphones and gimbals all help, and none of them fixes a video shot with a window behind you and the phone at chest height two metres away. Get the three free things right first, film for a month, and you will know from your own footage which piece of gear would actually change something.

The short answer

Face the window. Phone at eye height, an arm’s length away, resting on something. Stay within a metre of the microphone and turn the compressor off. Look at the lens rather than at your own face. That is the whole list, and it is free.

8 September 2026