Make Your Photos Self-Documenting
By Ken VanBree
In past columns I have written about the best kinds of pictures to take, and the best way to take them. But I have not said much about how many pictures you need to take to thoroughly document a home under construction. Ideally, you should take overlapping pictures of every interior wall so that you can find and fix any issue that may come up with wiring, plumbing, cracking or water intrusion in the future. This raises the question of how many pictures are required to cover every interior wall. The answer may be more than you think.
A typical digital camera zoomed out to its wide angle setting has a field of view equivalent to a 35 mm wide angle lens on a 35 mm film camera. If you stand eight feet from a wall and take a photograph with a 35 mm lens, your image will cover a wall area of about 4 x 8 feet, or roughly the area of a sheet of plywood or sheetrock. If you can only stand four feet from the wall or ceiling because the room is small, or because you don't feel like lying on the floor to photograph the ceiling, then your image only covers the area equivalent to 1/4 sheet of plywood. A simple rule of thumb is that to thoroughly cover all interior walls you need as many photographs as you need pieces of sheetrock. This results in about 20 pictures to cover the walls and ceilings of a 10 x 10 x 8 foot room, or 200 pictures per 1,000 square feet. This means that a 10,000-square-foot new home could require 2,000 photographs to document the studs round alone. With that many photographs to keep track of, it is easy to forget which photo belongs to which room. An example from our own home building experience illustrates the point.
When my wife and I built a new house several years ago, we installed a Lutron HomeWorks lighting control system. Every light switch in the house has a bundle of low-voltage wires attached. Our electrician had written cryptic numbers on the studs surrounding each light switch that indicated which low-voltage control wires were attached to that switch. I went around and took close-ups of every switch in our house before sheetrock was installed, so that I would be able to maintain and upgrade the system in the future. I have two images of three-gang switch boxes named P2450041.jpg and P2450042.jpg. The problem is that five years after building the house I have no idea which light switch belongs to which photograph. The pictures that I took during construction are essentially useless to me now.
In retrospect, I should have included some sort of markers in the light switch images in order to identify them later on. A simple solution would be to hold up a portion of the floor plan with a pointer indicating the switch location and photograph it along with the switch box. Not only is the photograph self-documenting, but also, the annotated floor plan can never get separated from the switch box image.
If you take pictures at multiple job sites every day, you can make the job site photos self-documenting by starting the photo sequence at each job site with an image that contains the street address of the site. Similarly, if you need to record details of several rooms in a house (for example, all electrical boxes), take an overall picture of the room before you record the details. If you need to take multiple pictures of a wall in order to document the wiring and piping before installing sheetrock, you can make your life much easier by consistently taking images from left to right then top to bottom. If you are taking detailed images of all walls in a room, start with an overall picture of the room that includes the starting wall, then do each wall in sequence in a clockwise direction. A little time thinking about how you will identify photos in the future can save you a lot of frustration five years from now.
November 2005 Builder Architect Edition Issue