5 Tips for Taking Photos of a Truck Accident Scene
3 min readAccident scene photos are something that you’d expect other parties like the police or accident investigators to take. However, that’s not always true – sometimes, the photos aren’t sufficient to prove a point, or they aren’t shared with the other parties.
It’s always best to take photos yourself at a truck accident scene. Whether you’re just helping out because you happened to witness the accident or you were involved, getting valuable snaps will be enormously helpful for attorneys that represent truck drivers. They can help to prove what happened, the rate of travel, braking actions, the path of travel for different vehicles, and other damage too.
In case you’re ever in this situation, here are 5 tips for taking better photos at a truck accident scene.
- Don’t Worry About Camera Quality
It’s not necessary to be sporting a DSLR camera with 4K resolution to take some useful photos. While a higher resolution is always useful to be able to zoom into a photo later to get a close-up, you can only do what you can do. Most smartphones today come with acceptable cameras. While some will provide inferior night shots, many now have night modes to improve the shots too.
Do switch the image mode to the highest available resolution. Think about how much storage space is available on the phone when doing so. Find a balance to take enough photos at a high-quality resolution without maxing out the storage capacity.
- Capture Photos of What Matters
Aim to get close-up photos as well as those that capture the accident scene. Photos of the truck and other vehicles involved in the accident are necessary. This can confirm what damage they’ve sustained. Traffic lights and their location are useful too. Also, injuries to the people involved might be visible in a photo, even though some injuries will be under clothing, or could be mainly internal. Document skid marks on the road that indicate an out-of-control vehicle or fast braking. Also, get shots of the location, broken vehicle debris scattered about, or relevant traffic signs.
- Get Different Angles
Drivers may have entered an intersection or seen their motion of travel originating from different directions. Therefore, it’s necessary to get different angles of on-scene photos by stepping back to a 15–20-foot distance and from different positions. Doing so provides both a sense of perspective and proves a better idea of what each driver would have seen at the time.
- Don’t Ignore Property Damage
If there has been property damage such as a truck or another vehicle impacting a wall or coming to rest in the side of a home, take photos of the property damage too. Any claim will likely include vehicle and property damage, along with personal injuries, so photos relating to these aspects help to form a complete picture.
- Check the Photos for Quality
It’s easy to take a bunch of photos and they’re either blurry and out of focus, or you’ve accidentally cropped out an important part of the shot. Checking the photos to ensure that you’ve captured what you intended to capture is so important because you cannot go back later and have a “do-over.” It also helps to check that the memory isn’t full, otherwise, some of the photos won’t have saved even though you believed they had.
Taking photos of a trucking accident is important to get right. Leaving important details out will have lawyers and insurance adjustors scrambling to try to find anyone else who happened to capture the moment. When something important is not captured, making a legal case is harder without the necessary proof.
