Most households point every camera at the front door. The angles that actually produce usable footage are usually somewhere else.
Buying a camera is the easy part. Where it ends up on the wall decides whether you get footage a police officer can work with or a series of blurry night-time alerts about a cat.
Public crime-prevention guidance from police departments tends to converge on the same handful of points. None of them are complicated, and most households get at least one wrong.
The front door is where you enter, so it is where the camera goes. But the front of a house is also the most visible part of it from the street, which is exactly why it is not usually the point of entry. Back doors, side gates, basement windows and anything screened by a fence or hedge are quieter, and quiet is what matters.
Walk the property once and ask a blunt question at each side: if I had to get in without being seen from the road, where would I try? That is the first camera.
Roughly two and a half to three metres puts a camera out of casual reach while still capturing a face. Go higher — under the eaves, up at gutter level — and you get a beautiful view of the top of someone’s head and a baseball cap, which identifies nobody.
Aim for the camera to catch a face at the point a person is closest to it, which usually means pointing it slightly across an approach path rather than straight down it.
A camera framed tightly on a doorway records someone who is already there. A camera that covers the driveway, the path or the gate records the approach — direction of travel, vehicle, how long they waited, whether they came back. That is the footage that connects one incident to another.
Point a camera at a bright background — a west-facing wall in the late afternoon, a street light, a white garage door — and the sensor exposes for the bright part, leaving the person in front of it as a silhouette. The same happens at night with a porch light directly in frame.
The fix is free: shift the angle a few degrees until the strong light source is out of shot.
Night vision works by lighting the scene with infrared and reading what comes back. Pointed across open lawn, there is nothing close enough to reflect, and the image goes dark beyond a few metres. Pointed along a wall, a fence line or a driveway, it performs far better.
Also worth knowing: infrared reflects hard off glass. A camera placed inside a window, looking out, will usually produce a white wall of glare after dark unless you switch the infrared off and rely on outside lighting.
The most common reason a household abandons its cameras is not the hardware. It is thirty notifications a day. Narrow the motion zone to the part of the frame that matters, raise the sensitivity threshold until passing traffic stops triggering it, and keep the number of cameras that can wake a phone at night to the ones covering entry points.
If you are still choosing a device, our review of a no-subscription camera families commonly install at a parent’s house is here.