Back in the spring (whilst I was on Furlough Leave and had time for weeknotes), I wrote about some upgrades to my home office. The LED lights didn’t work out (battery life was too short – I need to find something that works from mains power) so they went back to Amazon but the Marantz MPM-1000U microphone has been excellent.

I’ve seen a few tweets and videos recently about using software to use a smartphone camera as a webcam. Why might you do that? Well, because many laptop webcams are a bit rubbish (like the one in my Apple MacBook) or poorly placed, giving an unflattering view from below.

I had a play with the Iriun webcam software recommended in this video from Kevin Stratverdt and it worked really well, with the phone on a tripod, giving a better angle of view.

Ultimately though, the Microsoft Surface Pro 6 that I use for work has a pretty decent webcam, and my Nokia 7 Plus was no better quality – all I was really gaining was a better camera position.

I do still have a challenge with lighting. My desk position means that I’m generally back-lit with a north-facing window to my left. Some fill-in light in front might help but I also wanted to adjust the settings on my webcam.

Microsoft Teams doesn’t let me do that – but the Camera app in Windows 10 does… as described at Ceofix, there is a “Pro mode” in the Windows 10 Camera app that allows the brightness to be adjusted. There are more options for still images (timer, zoom, white balance, sensitivity, shutter speed and brightness) but the brightness option for video let me tweak my settings a little.

The next challenge I had was with audio. Despite using the volume controls on the Surface Pro to knock the volume up to 100% whilst I was presenting over Teams earlier, everyone else on the call sounded very quiet. It turned out that 100% was not 100% – there is a Realtek Audio Console app on my PC which, as well as letting me adjust the speaker and microphone settings, including volume, balance, Dolby audio, sample rate and depth. Finding this revealed that my volume was actually no-where near 100% and I was quickly able to increase it to a level where I could hear my client and co-presenters!