Welcome to another edition of It’s in the Details, a short newsletter intended to provide helpful information for those in the litigation industry who deal with forensic engineering experts and their work.
Incident Scene Photos Are Worth Their Weight in Gold to Your Forensic Expert
Short of a video documenting an incident occurring, original files of scene photographs can be extremely valuable to a forensic expert performing an incident analysis. Often, the greater the number of such photos which exist, the fuller an analysis the expert can perform.
So, “How many photographs should be taken at an incident scene?” The short answer is “You can never take too many.” Sometimes, when the physical evidence is still in place, it may be too early for a potential party to know whether a case will proceed to litigation or not. In this case, the potential litigant or their counsel or investigator need to grab the bull by the horns and get out to the scene and start shooting!
Some tips you can give to whomever you “deputize” to take your pics:
- First, plan on taking as many photos as practicable – hopefully, at least a dozen, but many more is better
- Take them from as many different angles as possible
- Very importantly, take photos from varying distances! Shoot some photos which take in the whole scene and then others which focus on a particular piece of evidence. Some investigators use a technique of “rings” in which photos are taken along circular paths around the center of the action, at increasingly closer distances to the critical evidence.
- Of course, and as we’ve discussed in a past newsletter, be sure save all such photographs in their original format, at full resolution, and with all metadata intact. Do NOT “text” them off a phone or reduce them for emailing. Instead, use an online file transfer service to distribute them.
Even a handful of decent scene photos can be used to recreate the positions of objects that are no longer present, like the cactus at an intersection in a project our firm worked on years ago.
Hopefully, this month’s newsletter has you making sure you’ve got some great (or at least a voluminous number of) photographs of your scene archived for future use. Thanks for reading, and feel free to reach out to us with any technical questions you might have about this or other topics related to forensic engineering.