6.1: Introduction

As noted in previous chapters, cameras have been used to document aspects of crime scenes or the faces of people convicted of crimes since the 1880’s. As photography was a very specialized science, or art depending on your perspective, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the photographs themselves were precious and few. The cameras were bulky, heavy, and required a large tripod. The photographs taken were generally an overall view of the scene, and there is no guarantee that the scenes were not staged or posed to get the entire scene into one frame. Because early cameras were so difficult to maneuver around a crime scene, hand-drawn sketches and drawings were more common to the courtroom than a photograph. Photographs of that time could easily be altered as the plate negatives provided large canvases for manipulation in the darkroom; and thus, the resulting photograph itself was no guarantee that it was an accurate representation of the scene or object having been photographed.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Photographer A. W. Leanord with Large Format Plate Camera of the early 1900's – Library of Congress

As cameras evolved into the convenient size that they are today, the role of the camera became more important to modern forensic sciences. Today, cameras are used to fully document crime scenes, capture accurate images of important items of trace and transfer evidence for comparative purposes, are useful in the analysis of bullet trajectories and bloodstain patterns, record injuries before metamorphic or surgical change have occurred, and many other forensic applications.

For this chapter, we will divide the topic of forensic photography into three parts: crime scene photography, wound photography, and comparison quality photography. First, however, we will start with the camera itself.