FORENSIC PHOTOGRAPHY

Module 1

Introduction

Photography can aid the speedy reconstruction and re-enactment of the crime as well as in
the determinants of the perpetrator of the crime. Among branches of forensic science or known as
criminalistics, forensic photography is one of the most significant since it can be applied in all allied
branches of it, such as: dactyloscopy, questioned document examination, forensic ballistics,
polygraphy, etc. In the absence of photography is the failure of whatever brances of criminalistics and
criminal investigation itself.

In photography we have the four main ingredients or elements namely: Light (natural and artificial),
sensitized materials (film and photographic paper), mechanical (camera with accessories and enlarger
machine or contact printer) , and chemicals (developer, stop bath, and fixer). In modern scientific
crime detection, photogprahy is indeed, an excellent aid of investigator. The investigator could not
rely on his memories and therefore need an artificial recorder for him to remember all the things and
the facts that he had investigated. Aside from notes of the investigator, he needs a camera, because
there are things which require accurate descriptions of subject or object being investigated, hence
photographs will serve the purpose.

MODERN AND LITERAL DEFINITION OF PHOTOGRAPHY

PHOTOGRAPHY is an art or science which deals with the reproduction of images through the
action of light, upon sensitized materials, with the aid of a camera, and it’s accessories, and the
chemical processes involved therein. In literal sense, photography is derivative of two greek words
“phos” which means “light” and “graphia, graphos, graphein” meaning “to write or to draw”. In other
words, in photography it is possible to write by means of light.

PRINCIPLES OF PHOTOGRAPHY

In photography the four main ingredients and elements are very important they are the light,
sensitized materials, mechanical, and chemical. To start with the light it is designed for exposure or
recording of an image of the object being photographed during picture taking and printmaking
process in an emulsion of sensitized materials in a form of latent image, without light recording
images in an emulsion of film and photographic paper is impossible to be happened.

Second the sensitized materials which includes the film and photographic paper, their emulsion is
sensitive to light because of silver halides and that sensitivity can be recorded of an image with
controlling of light reaching on it to avoid under or over exposed but in fact to produce normal
exposed, the film is loaded in the film holder of the camera during opening of shutter at a given point
of time upon pressing the shutter release button and then the light will bring the latent image of the
object in an emulsion of film and later it will produce negative copy after processing in the chemicals
with the basis of making a positive copy without negative copy of course we cannot produce a
photograph, while on the other hand the sensitized material used in printmaking to produce positive
copy or photograph is called photographic paper it is loaded in an easel of enlarger machine with the
emulsion of facing upward in the emulsion of negative copy also and in case of contact printing it is
loaded inside the contact printer below with negative copy which their emulsion is facing to each
other.

Third the mechanical which means all the gadgets use in photography such as camera with
its accessories, enlarger machine, contact printer, etc. The camera is use to produce negative copy
and enlarger machine or contact printer is utilized for making of positive photograph.
 And the fourth, the chemical which includes: developer, stop bath and fixer, after the
exposure of film and photographic paper the image there in its emulsion is not yet visible and
permanent therefore it requires chemical processing to make it visible and permanent. The exposed
film after the chemical processing it is called negative copy the partial product of photography while
exposed photographic paper right after the said processing in chemicals it is called positive copy or
photograph finished product of photography. In other words, in conventional photography to produce
negative copy and positive copy or photographs the four main ingredients or elements are very
important in the absent of one of them the production of images is nothing to be happened.

BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY

All photography was originally “monochrome”, or black and white. Even after color film was
readily available, black and white photography continued to dominate for decades, due to its lower
cost and its “classic” photographic look.

COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY

It is the photography that uses media capable of representing colors, which are traditionally
produced chemically during the photographic processing phase. By contrast, black and white
(monochrome) photography records only a single channel of luminance (brightness) and uses media
capable only of showing shades of gray. In color photography, light sensitive chemicals or electronic
sensors record color information at the time of exposure. This is usually done by analyzing the
spectrum of colors into three channels of information, one dominated by red, another by green, and
the third by blue, in imitation of the way the normal human eye senses color. The recorded
information is then used to reproduced the original colors by mixing various proportion of red, green,
and blue light, or by using dyes or pigments to remove various proportions of the red, green, and blue
which are present in the white light ( cyan, magenta, yellow) .

DIFFERENCE OF B & W and COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY

The black and white photography cannot render the real colour of the object because only
two colors will appear for a white color of the object being photographed it really as white, however
non white color of the object it will appear as black and for that matter the faithfulness of its product
is unreliable. While on the other hand, color photography it can record the same likeness as seen in
the actual object that regards to the colors. In the court of justice during presentation of photographic
evidence they are closely examined the colors and appearance of the object appearing in the
photograph in general as compared in the actual object.

DIFFERENCE OF DIGITAL AND CHEMICAL PHOTOGRAPHY

An important difference between digital and chemical photography is that the chemical
photography resist photo manipulation because it involves film and photographic paper, while digital
imaging is highly manipulative medium. This difference allows for a degree of image post processing
that is comparatively difficult in film based photography and permits different communicative
potentials and applications.

DIFFERENCE OF PICTRURE AND PHOTOGRAPH

Refers to all kinds of form of images, it can be a product of photography or not. On the other
hand, photograph is only a product of photography its either conventional or digital. A photograph it
can be a picture and also a picture it can be a photograph but not all the picture is a photograph.

FORENSIC PHOTOGRAPHY- the principles of photography in the preparation of photographic

evidence, and it’s application to police work.

POLICE PHOTOGRAPHY- is the art or science of photographically documenting a crime scene and
evidence for laboratory examination and analysis for purposes of court trial.
USE OF PHOTOGRAPHY

- Personal Identification
- For record purposes “the utmost use of photography in police works”
- For communication
- For preservation “for legal proceeding”
- For discovering and proving

SPECIAL USES OF PHOTOGRAPHY:

 INFRARED PHOTOGRAPHY- is the recording of images formed infrared radiation. It can

penetrate haze that scatters the waves of visible light
 ULTRAVIOLET PHOTOGRAPHY- the art or process of photographing or recording unseen objects
by means of ultraviolet light
 PHOTOMICROGRAPHY- taking magnified photograph of small object through attaching a camera
to ocular of a compound microscope to show minute detail of physical evidence.
 PHOTOMACROGRAPHY- is extreme close-up photography, usually a very small object/ subject in
which the size of the subject in the photograph is greater than life size.
 MICRO-PHOTOGRAPHY- is the production of photographs in which the image of an object is
reproduced much smaller than it is. It is just the opposite of photomacrography.
 MUG SHOT PHOTOGRPAPHY- it is usually use for personal identification which is the first use of
photography in police work.
 X-RAY PHOTOGRAPHY- it is widely use in medicine, industry, and science. It is quiet different
from ordinary photography. X rays are invisible electromagnetic waves.

IMPORTANT EVENTS AND PERSONALITIES

Ancient times: Camera obscura used to form images on walls in darkened rooms; image formation
via pinhole.

16TH CENTURY brightness and clarity of camera obscura was improved by enlarging the hole inserting
a telescope lens.

17th century Camera obscura in frequent use by artists and made portable in the form of sedan chairs.

1727 prof. J Schulze mixes chalk, nitric acid, and silver in a flask; notices darkening on side of flask
exposed to sunlight. Accidental creation of the first photo sensitive compound.

1854 An englishman, Maddox, developed a dry plate photography eclipsing Daguerre’s wet plate on
thin method. This made practical the photography of inmates for prison record.

1859 In the United States, one of the earliest applied Forensic Science was in Photography. It was
used to demonstrate evidence in a California Case. Enlarged photographs of signature were presented
in a court involving forgery.

1839 is generally known as the birth year of photography. William Henry Fox Talbot explained a
process he had invented ( calotype) at the royal society london.

WILLIAM HENRY FOX TALBOT He was a british inventor and photography pioneer who invented the
“calotype”, a precursor to photographic processes of the 19 th and 20th centuries. This reduced the
minimum exposure time in the camera from over an hour to only a minute or two.

LOUIS JACQUES MANDE DAGUERRE invented daguerreotype camera. Made a public demonstration
in Paris “Daguerreotype” in collaboration with JOSEPH NICEPHORE NIEPCE.

CALOTYPE used paper with its surface fiber impregnated with light sensitive compounds.

DAGUERREOTYPE formed an image directly on the silver surface of a metal plate.

  Note: with talbots “calotype”, the fixation was only partial while Daguerre’s
“Daguerreotype”’ images were made permanent with the use of hypo.

JOSEPH NICEPHORE NIEPCE french inventor, most noted as one of the inventors of photography and
a pioneer in the field. He developed his process called “heliography” which literally means “Sun
writing” a technique used to produce the world’s oldest surviving photograph in 1825.

RICHARD LEACH MADDOX (1816-1902) English Photographer and physician who invented “Light
weight gelatin negative plates” for photography in 1871. Long before his discovery, Maddox was
prominent in what was called “photomicrography”- photographing minute organisms under the
microscope.

FREDERICK SCOTT ARCHER (1813-1857) He invented the photographic “Collodion Process” the fastest
way of forming image.

JOHN FREDERICK WILLIAM HERSCHEL (1792-1871) english mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and
experimental photographer or inventor who in some years also did botanical work. He coined the
term photography in 1856.

JAMES CLERK MAXWELL (1831-1879) he was a scottish mathematical physicist. Maxwell contributed
to the field of optics and the study of Color Vision, creating the foundation for practical color
photography. From 1855 to 1872, he published at intervals a series of valuable investigations
concerning the perception of color, color-blindness and color theory.

THOMAS SUTTON (1819-1875) he was an english photographer, inventor, and author. In 1859, sutton
developed the earliest panoramic camera with a wide angle lens. The camera was capable of
capturing an image in a 120 degree arc. In 1861, Sutton created the first single lens reflex camera.
Sutton was the photographer for james clark maxwell.

GEORGE EASTMAN (1854-1932) He was an American innovator an entrepreneur who founded the
“Eastman Kodak Company” and popularized the use of roll film, helping to bring photography to the
mainstream.

ALPHONSE BERTILLON (1853-1914) He was a french photographer, who first realizes that
photographs were futile for identification if they were not standardized by using the same lighting,
scale and angles. He wanted to replace traditional photographic documentation of criminals with a
system that would guarantee reliable identification. He suggested anthropological studies of profiles
and full face shots to identify criminals. He published “La Photographie Judiciare” in 1890. He is
credited as invention of the mug shot. He was also the first to methodically photograph and
document crime scenes. And he called it “God’s-eye-view”.

MODULE 2
PHOTOGRPAHIC RAYS- ITS NATURE AND CHARACTERISTICS
LIGHT
Is an electromagnetic radiation within a certain portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The word usually refers to visible light, which is visible to human eye and is responsible for the sense
of sight. Visible light is usually defined as having wavelenghts in the range of 400-700 nanometers,
between infrared (longer wavelengths) and the ultraviolet (with shorter wavelengths). This
wavelength means a frequency range of roughly 430-750 trahertz (THz). The speed of light in a
vacuum is defined to be exactly 299,792,458 m/s ( approximately 186, 282 miles per second).

TWO GENERAL SOURCES OF LIGHT

1. NATURAL LIGHT- our main source of natural light is the sun. The sun is a star that is a huge
ball of gas. Explosions at the center of the sun produce large amounts of energy. This energy
released as light and heat. Some of this lights reaches Earth and gives us daylight. The light
that comes the sun is known as white light. Other forms of natural light include the moon
and the stars. The stars provide only small amount of light at night as they are billions of
kilometers away from earth. A full moon, however, can provide quite a lot of light. The light
from the moon is just light reflected from the sun. Some animals can produce their own light.
This is known bioluminescence. A chemical reaction is produced in special light producing
cells. This light is then used in a variety of ways but mainly to attract other creatures. Glow
worms, fireflies, some fish and mushrooms are examples of living things that create their
own light.

Sunlight- is the light and energy that comes from the sun. When this energy reaches the
earth’s surface, it is called insolation. What we experience as sunlight is actually solar
radiation. It is the radiation and heat from the sun in the form of electromagnetic waves. The
atmosphere affects the amount of solar radiation received. When solar radiation travels
through the atmosphere, some of it is absorbed by the atmosphere (16%). Some of it is
scattered to space (6%). Some of it is reflected by clouds (28%). About 47% of it reaches the
earth’s surface.

Kinds of Sunlight:

1.1 Bright sunlight – it is a sun lighting condition where objects in an open space cast a deep
and uniform or distinct shadow.
1.2 Hazy sunlight- In this sun lighting condition the objects in open space cast a transparent
shadow.
1.3 Dull sunlight – it is a lighting condition of the sun that no more shadow to be cast by an
object in open space. No shadow.

2. ARTIFICIAL LIGHT- Humans have been able to create and control light for thousand years.
The earliest form of lighting was with fire such as burning wood, candies, gas or oil. Candles
were made out beeswax or tallow (animal fat). Oil lamps used plant or animal oil and a wick
to burn. Now the most convenient source of artifical light is the electric light.

Types of Electric Light:

2.1 Tungsten Filament Bulbs- They are cheap to make and easy to use. They contain a thin
metal filament made out of tungsten (a type of metal). This filament becomes very hot
when electricity flows through it and glows yellow-white. These bulbs last only about
1000 hours because the filament becomes thinner as it burns,
2.2 Neon Lights- It is commonly used for advertising. Neon is a gas that gives out light when
high-voltage electricity passed through it. By changing electric current, up to five
different colors can be produced in the same tube.
 2.3 Fluorescent Tubes- they are widely used in the office and in home. Fluorescent tubes are
glass tubes that contain mercury vapor. When an electric current is passed through the
mercury vapor it gives off ultraviolet light. This ultraviolet light is absorbed by phospor
powder that coats the inside of the tube and starts to glow to make blue-white light.
These lights need special electronic starters to produce the high voltage needed to start
the light.

SPECTRUM

It is the distribution of colors produced when white light is dispersed by a prism or diffraction
grating. There is a continuous change in wavelength from red, the longest wavelength, to violet, the
shortest. Seven colors are usually distinguished: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet,
the whole range of electromagnetic radiation with respect to its wavelength or frequency any
particular distribution of electromagnetic radiation often showing lines or bands characteristics of the
substance emitting the radiation or absorbing it.

Kinds of Visible Spectrum

1. Red light- The visible red light has a wavelength of about 650 nanometer. At sunrise and
sunset, red and orange colors are present because the wavelengths associated with these
colors are less efficiently scattered by the atmosphere than the shorter wavelength colors.
(e.g., blue and purple). A large amount of blue and violet light has been removed as a result
of scattering and the long wave colors, such as red and orange, are more readily seen.
2. Orange- The visible orange light has a wavelength of about 590 nanometer.
3. Yellow Light- the visible yellow light has wavelength of about 570 nanometer. Low pressure
sodium lamps, like those used in some parking lots, emit a yellow ( wavelength 589
nanometer) light.
4. Green Light- the visible green light has a wavelength of about 510 nanometer. Grass, for
example, appears green because all of the colors in the visible part of the spectrum are
absorbed into the leaves of the grass except green. Green is reflected, therefore grass
appears green.
5. Blue Light- the visible blue light has a wavelength of about 475 nanometer. Because the blue
wavelength is shorter in the visible spectrum, they are scattered more effeciently by the
molecules in the atmosphere. This causes the sky to appear blue.
6. Indigo Light- The visible Indigo light has a wavelength of about 445 nanometer
7. Violet Light- The visible violet light has a wavelength of about 400 nanometer. Within the
visible wavelength spectrum, violet and blue wavelengths are scattered more efficiently than
other wavelengths. The sky looks blue, not violet because our eyes are more sensitive to blue
light (the sun also emits more energy as blue light than as violet.

PRISM
In optics, a prism is a transparent optical element with flat, polished surfaces that refract
light. At least two of the flat surfaces must have a angle between them. The exact angles between the
surfaces depend on the application. The traditional geometrical shape is that of a triangular prism
with a triangular base and rectangular sides, and in colloquial use “prism” usually refers to this type.
Some types of optical prism are not in fact in the shape of geometric prisms. Prisms can be made from
any material that is transparent to the wavelengths for which they are designed. Typical materials
include glass, plastic and fluorite. A dispersive prim can be used to break light up into its constituent
spectral colors ( the colors of the rainbow). Furthermore, prism can be used to reflect light, or to split
light into components with different polarization.
ADDITIVE COLOR

Additive color is a color created by mixing a number of different light colors, with shades of
red, green and blue being the most common primary colors used in additive color system. Additive
color is in contrast to subtractive color, in which colors are created by subtracting (absorbing) parts of
the spectrum of light present in ordinary white light, by means of colored pigments or dyes, such as
those in paints, inks and the three dye layers in typical color photographs on film. The combination of
two of the standard three additive primary colors in equal proportions produces an additive
secondary color namely can, magenta, and yellow in which in the form of dyes or pigments, are the
standard primary colors in subtractive color systems. The subtractive system can be viewed as an
alternative approach to reproducing a wide range of colors by controlling the relative amounts of red,
green and blue light that reach the eye. James Clerk Maxwell is credited as being the father of
additive color.

SUBTRACTIVE COLOR

A subtractive color model explains the mixing of a limited set of dye, inks, paint pigments or
natural colorants to create a wider range of colors, each the result of partially or completely
subtracting that is absorbing some wavelengths of light and not others. The color that a surface
displays depends on which parts of the visible spectrum are not absorbed and therefore remain
visible. Subtractive color systems start with light, presumably white light. Colored inks, paints, or
filters between the watchers and the light source or reflective surface subtract wavelengths from the
light, giving it color. If the incident light is other than white, our visual mechanisms are able to
compensate well, but not perfectly, often giving flawed impression of the “true” color of the surface.

IMPORTANCE OF LIGHT IN PHOTOGRAPHY

Based on literal meaning of photography it was a derivative from two Greek words phos
means “light” and graphia means to “write” so in short light is very important in the field of
photography without this, exposure is impossible to happened. It is designed to capture or record the
image of the object into the emulsion of film or memory card of digital camera during picture taking
and to project the image from the negative copy to the emulsion of photographic paper as regard to
printmaking process.

EXPOSURE

The quantity of light allowed acting on a photographic material; a product of the intensity
controlled by the lens opening and the duration controlled by the shutter speed or enlarging time of
light striking the film or paper. The act of allowing light to reach the light sensitive emulsion of the
photographic sensitized material. Also refers to the amount duration and intensity of light which
reaches the film. Exposure in photography would happened twice around first during photo shoot
with the aid of light, film and camera illustrated .

Kinds of Exposure:

1. UNDER EXPOSURE- this will happen when the quantity of light reaching the emulsion of
sensitized materials are deficient with the needed quantity to make it normal. A negative
copy could be considered under exposed when it has a high contrast image. On the other
hand, a photograph may be described as under exposed when it has a loss of shadow detail,
that is, when important dark areas are “muddy” or indistinguishable from black, known as
“blocked-up shadows” or sometimes “crushed shadows”, “crushed blacks”, or “clipped
blacks”, especially in video.
2. NORMAL EXPOSURE- Otherwise known as a correct exposure. This result of exposure occurs
when tha quantity of light reaching the emulsion of sensitized materials is sufficient not over
or under. A negative and positive could be considered normal exposed when it has normal
contrast image.
3. OVER EXPOSURE- This could be happen when the quantity of light reaching the emulsion of
sensitized materials exceeded with the prescribed amount of light which supposed to be
necessary for better result. A negative copy could be considered over exposed when it has a
low contrast image. While a photograph may be described as over exposed when it has a loss
of highlight detail, that is, when important bright parts of an image are “washed out” or
effectively all white, known as “brown-out highlights” or “clipped whites”.