light: a ring light made of your screen

the short version

every camera screen in underway now has a switch called light, in the corner of the picture. turn it on and your screen becomes a ring light: the page around the preview goes a bright, warm white while the camera is on, and goes back to normal the moment it closes.

on the phone's back camera, when you film a fragment, light is the torch instead. it is on the web and the phone, on the interview, just talk, talk about it, the co-host on camera and a moment. it remembers your choice on each device.

why it exists

rich, who builds underway, filmed an episode in his car on 4 october, in the dark, with the co-host on camera on his phone. the conversation was good. the picture was a face lit by nothing much, and there was nothing in the app to help.

that is the whole problem with filming whenever suits you. whenever suits you is sometimes a car park, a hotel room, a kitchen with one bulb, a desk in a corner. you are not going to carry a light. you are not going to move house for the episode. but you are already holding the brightest thing in the room, and it is pointed straight at your face.

a phone or laptop screen turned mostly white is a soft, even light from just below eye level, which is roughly where a ring light sits. it will not make a dark car look like a studio. it does take a face from a silhouette to a person, which is the difference between an episode you post and one you quietly leave in the vault.

what it does, exactly

• on the web: a warm white border all the way round the page, the page behind everything turns warm white, and a soft glow sits round the preview itself. the dark studio card stays dark, so the words on it are still readable.
• on the phone, front camera: the screen behind the recorder turns warm white and a bright frame wraps the preview.
• on the phone, back camera: the torch, for a fragment of the whiteboard or the room when the room is dark.
• it is only on while the camera is open on that screen. leave the screen and everything goes back.

never in the footage

the light is around the preview, for your face. it is never drawn into the take. what gets recorded is the camera's own picture, exactly as before: the switch, the border and the glow are page furniture, the same as the record button. your episode looks like you in better light, not like you in front of a white frame.

it notices when it is dark, once

underway already samples the preview a few times a second while you set up, a tiny 32-pixel copy that is thrown away straight after, to tell you when the light is behind you. now, when the picture is dark, it offers light in one line: it's dark here. turn on light? with turn on beside it and a cross.

it asks once a day on that device. press the cross and it is gone, it costs nothing, and it does not come back that day. it never nags, never blocks the record button, and a dark take is still a take. that is the rule for every prompt in underway: one tap to accept, one tap to dismiss, and dismissing is free.

what the phone cannot do yet

the phone does not turn your screen brightness up on its own yet. that needs a piece of the app that only arrives with a new build from the app store, not with the updates the app downloads by itself. until then, in a dark room, switch light on and pull the brightness up from control centre. the phone's own recorder does not read the picture for darkness yet either, so on the phone the switch is yours to press.

the co-host on camera on the phone runs the same page as the web, so there you get the warm border and the one-line offer when it is dark.

a few habits that help

• face the brightest thing in the room, and let the screen fill in the shadows. light from behind you turns you into an outline whatever the screen does.
• in a car, a street light through the windscreen beats one from the side window.
• if it is so dark that light alone cannot save it, a podcast is the episode that needs no light at all.

light is in the corner of every camera screen, on the web and the phone. start a series.