Four of Your Five Cameras Are Watching a Fence.

By Sam | HowTo: Home Edition | Install | August 2026

the number of cameras is not the thing. what each one is pointed at is the entire thing.

a neighbour of mine had a package taken and four cameras running. we sat and watched all four clips. camera one: a very good recording of a hedge. camera two: the top of a baseball cap for one and a half seconds. camera three: a driveway at such a steep angle that a human being read as a moving shadow. camera four: the side of the house nobody has ever walked past, filmed beautifully, in high definition, for two years.

this is the normal outcome, and it isn't a hardware problem. cameras got cheap and good very fast. aiming them did not.

so: five spots. not five cameras — you can do a lot of this with three — five jobs, in the order i'd cover them.

Spot 1 — the approach, not the doorstep

the most common mistake in the entire category: a camera mounted directly above the door, aimed straight down at the mat. what that records is the crown of a hat and a pair of shoulders, for about a second and a half, at an angle no human face survives.

aim along the walk instead. you want someone in frame while they're still coming toward you — from the sidewalk, the gate, the end of the drive. that gives you a whole person, walking, at a distance the lens can handle: build, clothing, how they move, and a face turned roughly toward the camera rather than roughly toward the floor.

the practical test is embarrassing but works. walk up to your own door the way a stranger would. watch the clip afterward. if you can't identify yourself, and you know it's you, nobody else is going to manage it.

Spot 2 — the driveway, along its length

cars, deliveries, and the thing that happens between the car and the front door. the mistake here is mounting high on the house and looking down, which flattens everything into a top-down view where people become hats again.

mount so the camera looks along the drive — from the house toward the street, or from a corner across the length of it. you want the whole run in frame: the vehicle, the walk from the vehicle, and the bit of pavement where boxes get left.

Spot 3 — the door nobody can see

this is the one people skip and it's the one i'd install second.

every house has a door or window that can't be seen from the street, from a neighbour's kitchen, or from anywhere a person might casually be. a side gate behind a fence. a back slider screened by a hedge. a basement door down three steps in the dark. that's the entry that gets used, precisely because it's the one where somebody can stand and take their time.

and it is almost always the last spot to get a camera, because when you're standing at the front of the house with a box in your hand, you point the camera at the part you look at every day.

Spot 4 — one camera inside, at the choke point

i know. indoors feels like a step too far for a lot of people, and if that's a hard no for you, skip it — i'm not going to argue.

but if you're open to one: an interior camera at the choke point does more than any two exterior ones. every house has a spot everything funnels through — the hallway, the landing, the bottom of the stairs. it's close range, it's evenly lit, and there's no weather, no glare and no distance. that's where footage stops being a grey shape and starts being a description.

one camera. pointed at a corridor. not the living room, not a bedroom — a corridor.

Spot 5 — whatever's dark

this one isn't a compass direction. walk the property at nine at night and find the piece of it you cannot see from any window. that's spot five.

and here's the order that matters: light it before you film it. a motion light does more of this job than a camera does, because it changes what happens rather than recording it. a camera in the dark gives you infrared, and infrared gives you a person-shaped thing in monochrome. useful for knowing something happened. not useful for saying who.

The mistakes that ruin the other four

height. roughly eight to nine feet is the range. high enough that someone can't casually swat it, low enough that it's photographing faces instead of the tops of heads. fifteen feet up under the gable looks tidy and gives you aerial footage of strangers' scalps.

the sun. a camera aimed east spends every morning blinded and a camera aimed west spends every evening the same way. it is worth going outside twice in one day before you drill anything.

the wall it's stuck to. exterior-rated fasteners, into something solid, with the cable routed so it isn't a handle. a camera on a bracket somebody can reach and turn is a camera aimed at the sky by tuesday.

your neighbours. don't point a camera into somebody else's window, garden or door. beyond being a genuinely rude thing to do, rules on this vary a lot by where you live, and the time to find out is before the bracket goes up, not after a conversation over a fence.

storage. decide where the footage lives before you buy. a card in the camera or a drive in the house means the recurring cost is zero, which matters, because a camera you stop paying for is a camera that stops working.

three cameras aimed at the right things beat six aimed at scenery, every time, and cost less. go outside, walk to your own door like a stranger, and watch the clip. that's the whole audit.

— sam / August 2026

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