A laptop sitting on a desk puts its camera about level with your chest, pointing up at you. That single fact is behind a lot of the reasons people dislike how they look on calls. The angle catches you from below, and from below almost everyone looks worse than they do in the mirror.
The under-chin problem
A camera below your eyeline looks up at you. It stares up at your jaw and nostrils, foreshortens your face, and can add a soft double chin that is not there at eye level. It also tends to leave a wall of ceiling above your head and shrink you into the bottom of the frame. The angle causes every bit of this. Move the lens up and the problem leaves with it. Prop a phone below anyone's chin and even a model looks off, so the fix is always the lens height.
Eye level is the whole trick
Raise the camera until the lens is level with your eyes, or a shade higher, angled gently down at you. Now the camera sees you the way a person standing in front of you would, which is the view you actually recognize as yourself. Your jawline comes back, the ceiling disappears, and you fill the frame at a natural height. This one adjustment does more for how you look on camera than your lighting, your background, or anything you wear. If you change one thing, change this.
What to prop it with
On a laptop, the simplest fix is to raise the whole machine. A laptop stand is cleanest, and a stack of sturdy books works just as well. Lift it until the lens reaches your eyeline, then use a separate keyboard and mouse so you can still type comfortably. If you work standing, set the height for standing and check the angle there too, because a camera set for sitting points at your chest the moment you stand up. An external webcam clipped to the top of a monitor at eye level gives you the best result and frees you from propping anything at all. The camera check shows your live framing so you can raise things until the eyeline looks right, rather than guessing and hoping.
Sit back and leave a little headroom
Height is half of it, and distance is the other half. Sitting too close lets the lens distort your features and fills the screen with face. Sit back far enough that the frame holds you from roughly the chest up, with a small margin of space above your head. A good target is to take up about the middle third of the frame, so you are neither a floating head nor lost across the room. That framing reads as calm and composed, and it is the same setup behind being confident on camera.
The wide-angle lens on most laptops and webcams makes distance matter more than you would think. These lenses stretch whatever is closest to them, so a face pressed up near the camera comes out with a larger nose and a rounder shape than you have in life. Give the lens some room and that stretch relaxes, and you look like yourself again. If you can only fix one of height or distance in a hurry, fix the height, but a few inches of extra distance is a quick second win that costs you nothing.
Check it once and forget it
The nice thing about camera angle is that you fix it once. Set the height, set the distance, and your calls stop working against you from then on. Take ten seconds before an important call to confirm nothing has shifted, then put it out of your mind and give your attention to the conversation.
Bloom can flag when your framing slips during a call, like sinking low in the frame or drifting too close, so the setup you dialed in stays right while you focus on talking.
The hard part of all this is noticing what you are doing while you are doing it, which is tough to catch on your own. We made an ambient app for exactly that. It runs on your Mac and gives you private feedback in the moment, and it never records or uploads anything.
Join the waitlistQuestions people ask
How high should my webcam be?
Set the lens at your eye level or slightly above, tilted a little down toward you, so the camera sees you straight on. On a laptop, raise the whole machine on a stand or a stack of books until the lens reaches your eyeline.
How far should I sit from the camera?
Sit back far enough that the frame holds you from about the chest up, with a small gap of headroom above you. Sitting too close lets the lens distort your features, so a little distance keeps your proportions looking natural.
Should I use a laptop stand or an external camera?
A stand that raises the laptop to eye level fixes the angle for free and is plenty for most calls. An external webcam clipped to a monitor at eye level gives a sharper, better-placed image if you are on video often and want the best result.