Good idea, thank you. I tried zooming in the cameras a bit to avoid the tree to the right, which is reflecting a lot of IR light. But it's a balance, since zooming in too much means they'll spend less time in the frame as they walk up the driveway.
I'm hoping that with as bright as the IR light is (it lights up the big tree's across the street), it'll make up for the poor low light performance of these 8MP cameras. I'll also see if I can adjust the night time exposure (and just the night time exposure) or maybe the Iris setting (if it can be manually controlled), to potentially let the light reflected off the nearby tree's blow out, so that maybe the shutter speed will be higher. It'd be nice if the cameras have a 'set the exposure for this part of the frame' and not just average it over the whole frame. I don't think they do. From what I remember, I couldn't even separately set the exposure for the night mode, so if I adjusted it up, it made the day mode way too bright. Maybe better software than the Hikvision NVR would support that -- I got an inexpensive used server off Craigslist, and plan to eventually move to better recording software. It seems like something they should do: change the camera's internal settings when they switch to night mode.
I turned off the IR lights in the cameras -- otherwise too many spiders like to just hang out in front of the cameras all night. The spiders have been gone since I added the external IR light. But I could add an IR light higher up, though I worry that'll make the light too 'hot and flat' and it'll make people's faces a wash of white.
Thank you again. I'll play with trying everything. I wasn't able to experiment past the NVR settings yesterday, since some of the camera's configuration is only accessible from a laptop plugged into that network (I keep the NVR off our home router/Internet, since I don't trust it's firmware)
