Forensic Photography Lighting

Video Transcript

"Hello I'm Mark Bowers from Bowers photography dot com from Utah. And we are going to talk about the forensic photography. I'd like to tell you the forensic photography is all about light. Where you place it, how you place it and the types of light. The light is the absolutely the most important thing in forensic photography. I like to do a little demonstration. Just grab a hair from my head, and it's right here, we've got a dark background and a dark floor. And we are just going to put the hair right on the floor right here. What I am going to do is take a little spotlight and a friend of mine has a the most powerful flashlight that he can buy to do the same thing. But I bring this little spotlight around. Can you see the spotlight? And I took it over to the side and all of a sudden that hair comes up. Can you see that now? This is the way you find things on dark floors. You can find little tiny, tiny particles and you can photograph these things right in place. Forensic photography is all about being very, very precise. A lot of forensic photographers use really nice rulers and they use this to show relationships and sizes between what you are trying to photograph and exactly how big it is. With footprints or tire tracks. The next project or the next thing that I wanted to talk about was the ring flash. There's a flash that you can put on your camera and it's a ring around the lens of your camera. It shows no shadows, that is used for positioning. When you want to photograph something that is in a precise position, and you don't want to show texture you just want to show positioning, you use this ring flash where there is no shadows around it."