Recommended camera placement? (cameras purchased; location pictures inside)

[sofakng]

Can I get some advice on camera placement for the three cameras/locations I have? I've already purchased the cameras (from Andy, based on his recommendations) so I'm just looking for placement advice.

I'm looking to see activity in the areas around my house and identification as secondary. I'm not sure if that's a great idea, but I want to see more of what's happening around my house and am less concerned with identification of a person (but obviously I still care about that too!)

Front Door (IPC-HDW4231EM-ASE 2.8mm) - Planning to place camera on the ceiling to the left of the door (either in the corner of the door wall/side wall, or moved along the side wall towards the front of the porch)



Back Door (IPC-HDW5231R-ZE) - Not sure here. I can either place camera directly above door pointing down, or mount on the wall to the right of the doors and slightly down the wall (wall mounted, not ceiling mounted).


Driveway (IPC-HDW5231R-ZE) - Andy suggests mounting camera directly above the garage door (maybe 1-2 feet) and in the middle. I'm not sure if this will capture/view the entire garage doorway?


Thanks so much for any help!!!

 

[awsum140]

Front door-on the right side of the door where the lock and doorbell are to catch the face.
Sliding door-on the soffet on the right again to get the face.
Garage-two cameras, one on each side, just above the top of the door or even down but watch the coach lights interfering with night vision(glare).

 

[sofakng]

Thanks very much for your suggestions. It seems like a lot of people recommend camera placement to catch the faces of intruders but doesn't that severely limit the usefulness of looking at a wider area? For example, I'd like to see if bears or deer are in my yard, or if somebody is in my front yard, etc.

 

[bigredfish]

You usually need both overview cams for situational awareness, and more focused cameras at choke points for ID. Hard to do everything with one camera.

That said, you may find with lowering the camera (6-8') you can actually accomplish some of both: get better depth of field and get a lot more useful image for ID as opposed to seeing the tops (bald spots) of a lot of things.

(remember to change the youtube player to 1080p)

 

[awsum140]

As looney2nes says, do you want to see what happened or who did it? With careful placement you can get the "who" as well as a good part of the "what". A five gallon bucket full of rocks and a eight foot 2x4 will let you test each location with a test camera to make sure you are maximizing the view of each of them.

 

[bababouy]

If you mount low, you will get a nice long view, If the camera is to high, you will miss the area close to the camera, or the camera will have to point down to capture the area close to the camera and will not capture a long view. Keep them around 8ft high.

 

[sofakng]

Thanks again so much to everybody for helping me out.

For testing out the camera location, I’m being stupid, but did you mean to fill a bucket with rocks, stick a 2x4 in it, and temporarily mount the camera to the 2x4 so I can move it around?

I think my front porch ceiling is only about 8 feet tall so is it really a bad idea to mount it on the ceiling and to the left of the front door?

 

[awsum140]

Yes, stick the 2x4 in a five gallon bucket, add rocks/pebbles/sand/whatever, mount the camera to the 2x4. You can even simulate a ceiling mount if you feel that's necessary.

To the left of the front door you will not get full, highly detailed, face shots when people are near the door. Mounting to the right will provide that. Think about how people would approach the door. One of the "golden rules" of security cameras is to not try to cover too much area, or too many things, with one camera. In my mind, and at my house, I have a total of eight cameras mounted, two on each side, facing back at one another. No dead spots because of overlapping coverage, reasonable close up views of all openings, doors and windows, and reasonable coverage of the yard areas as well. Adding some wedge style domes near each door is on my list, too.