How Do You Become a Forensic Photographer?

Video Transcript

"My name is Anthony Maddaloni and I'm going to talk about how to become a forensic photographer. One of the best ways to see if you want to become a forensic photographer is spend a day at the lab. You might be in for a pretty big shock at how a forensic lab really looks. With the popularity of certain shows on TV that show a forensic lab as a highly exciting and fast paced environment, you might not really find that to be the case. A forensic lab is really a science lab where people are looking for evidence and a lot of time documenting facts as to what happened in a crime or what happens in any kind of potential legal scene. So that's a pretty interesting angle on it. Its really, TV is fun and exciting, but real life maybe not so much fun and exciting sometimes. So you want to go be very professional in your approach and explain exactly what you want to do. There are certain schools and degrees that you can get in forensics and this is extremely, extremely interesting photography to me. But also it takes a certain type of personality to be able to do that type of photography properly. Its extremely important, I mean you're presenting evidence that can potentially change somebody's life. Its pretty, pretty, you have to have a high level of responsibility to do this type of photography. And obviously you have to have a pretty good stomach for certain crime scenes that maybe when you first get to one it affects you in a way that you'll never want to do that again. So you really have to ask yourself can I do this type of work? It is extremely science based in a way and to me that's sort of fascinating and there are certain aspects of forensic photography that along with the technology that's happening now that are changing everyday. So in a way, its really, really cool because you have this type of digital photography and certain types of panoramic photography that are really actually getting kind of close to what you see on TV. I mean you can really walk through in 3D a crime scene but that's extremely high end equipment, extremely expensive equipment, when I saw it I couldn't believe how much money this equipment costs. So those are some of the ways that you can get in to forensic photography."