Bill's setup wouldn't be perfect for everybody but it's very intentional and well adjusted for his needs. He's using a good camera and a lens with a wide apert

Bill's setup wouldn't be perfect for everybody but it's very intentional and well adjusted for his needs. He's using a good camera and a lens with a wide aperture to blur out the background (possibly even with ND filters to allow the wide aperture with brighter lighting). The bokeh is quite good on his blurry background: it's not meant to be just a gaussian blur, bokeh has edges (especially on point light sources) but in a nice way. It's definitely a real camera he's using with a proper lens. The anchor's hair is blending with her bookcase, color-wise. It's not the best possible background, there's too much sharp detail and contrast behind her (by contrast Gates is apparently in Heaven). She's got two points of light, one a larger area (you can see the reflections in her eyes) but Gates seems to have larger area lights, entirely to the sides. Maybe, maybe a light nearer the camera, but it's not very intense. Maybe just white area in front of him to bounce light. You can see reflections off the SIDE of his glasses, but there are no bright reflections IN his glasses and this is probably why he chose the way he did. He loses out on being able to have 'anime highlights' in his eyes for appeal, but he looks younger through the lighting covering him from all sides, hiding detail. When I stream or make videos, I push pretty hard to get useful effects out of the situation, and I go for a big flashy anime highlight reflected in my eyes. You can use an area light, like a tent, but those have to be HUGE to really push the highlight size and cover a broad area: like, several feet wide and right up next to you. Instead of that, I've been using a ring light and aiming the camera through it, using a slightly longer lens (and wide aperture, and modular synth for bokeh-ed out blinky lights in the background, and Hypno video generator to do stuff in the black areas of the shot, etc etc etc) It's pretty hilarious how close the ring light has to be, to take up any space in the image reflected off your eyeball. You're almost sticking your head through the ring light. All that matters is how the shot looks: viewers can't see all the crazy lighting that you're looking at. There's a competitive aspect to it. If I can beat Bill Gates's quality level, I'll feel I did a good job. I will not beat Ricky Tinez, no matter what I do :)