10 Tips for better construction photography
06 - Make your photos self documenting
In past columns I have talked about the kinds of pictures to take, when to take them and how to take them. I have not said much about how many pictures you need to take to thoroughly document a home under construction. The most important pictures you can take are just before sheet rock is installed. Ideally you should take overlapping pictures of every interior wall so that you can find and fix any issue that may come up with wiring, plumbing, cracking or water intrusion in the future. This raises the question of how many pictures are required to cover every interior wall. The answer may be more than you think.
A typical digital camera zoomed out to its wide angle setting has a field of view equivalent to a 35mm wide angle lens on a 35mm film camera. If you stand 8 feet from a wall and take a photograph with a 35 mm lens your image will cover a wall area of about 4x8 feet or roughly the area of a sheet of plywood or sheet rock. If you can only stand four feet from the wall or ceiling because the room is small or because you don't feel like lying on the floor to photograph the ceiling, then your image only covers the area equivalent to 1/4 sheet of plywood. A simple rule of thumb is that to thoroughly cover all interior walls you need as many photographs as you need pieces of sheet rock. This results in about 20 pictures to cover the walls and ceilings of a 10x10x8 ft room or 200 pictures per 1000 square feet. This means that a 10,000 square foot new home could require 2000 photographs to document the studs round alone. With that many photographs to keep track of, it is easy to forget which photo belongs to which room. An example from our own homebuilding experience illustrates the point.
When my wife and I built a new house several years ago we installed a Lutron HomeWorks lighting control system. Every light switch in the house has a bundle of low-voltage wires attached. Our electrician had written cryptic numbers on the studs surrounding each light switch that indicated which low voltage control wires were attached to that switch. I went around and took close ups of every switch in our house before sheet rock was installed so that I would be able to maintain and upgrade the system in the future. I have two images of three-gang switch boxes named P2450041.jpg and P2450042.jpg. The problem is that five years after building the house I have no idea which light switch belongs to which photograph. The pictures that I took during construction are essentially useless to me now.
In retrospect I should have included some sort of markers in the light switch images in order to identify them later on. A simple solution would be to hold up a portion of the floor plan with a pointer indicating the switch location and photograph it along with the switch box. Not only is the photograph self-documenting but also the annotated floor plan can never get separated from the switch box image.
If you take pictures at multiple job sites every day you can make the job site photos self-documenting by starting the photo sequence at each job site with an image that contains the street address of the site. Similarly, if you need to record details of several rooms in a house (for example all electrical boxes) take an overall picture of the room before you record the details. If you need to take multiple pictures of a wall in order to document the wiring and piping before installing sheet rock you can make your life much easier by consistently taking images from left to right then top to bottom. If you are taking detailed images of all walls in a room start with an overall picture of the room that includes the starting wall, then do each wall in sequence in a clockwise direction. A little time thinking about how you will identify photos in the future can save you a lot of frustration five years from now.
Ken VanBree is the owner of Imaging Perspective, a Bay Area firm that specializes in as-built construction photography. Questions or comments are welcome: ken@imagingperspective.com