Recommend a camera for this spot

[Lysdexik]

Hello all, good morning.

I’ve been lurking on here for a bit now, reading through various threads and coming to my own conclusions. I currently have around 6 IP Cameras around the perimeter of my home and they have all started to degrade over the years so I’m looking to replace them.

I purchased 5x IPC-T54IR-ZE and so far I’ve only installed one but am questioning whether or not it’s the right camera for this spot. I’ve attached a photo of the installed location and a day time view from the cam. Since I only installed this yesterday and had not enabled recording, I don't currently have a night photo to share but I would be happy to do so this evening as recording is now enabled.

If you can’t tell this spot is the strip between my house and my neighbors and the issue I noticed is that once it got dark enough for IR to come on, I am getting a lot of light reflection off of the siding and wondering if a bullet camera is a more suitable option here. There is very little light on this side of the house so I think an ultra low light is the only option and I won’t need this camera for reading license plates.

I did make some adjustments to the image in accordance with this thread Recommended settings for IPC-T5442T-ZE but I am by no means an expert so I am not sure if there are additional adjustments which would fix the issue or if swapping the camera is the better option.

 

[wittaj]

A bullet would have that much siding as well. But there are a lot of leaves there too.

You need to either zoom in more to see just the grass or physically rotate the camera 90 degrees to make it corridor and then rotate it in the camera GUI so it is the correct orientation.

 

[Ri22o]

^^ I agree.

Setting it up for "corridor mode" would be the way to go.

 

[Lysdexik]

A bullet would have that much siding as well. But there are a lot of leaves there too.

You need to either zoom in more to see just the grass or physically rotate the camera 90 degrees to make it corridor and then rotate it in the camera GUI so it is the correct orientation.

Ok well that answers the question about doing a bullet, so that’s helpful, thank you.

I had originally planned to mount it as you suggested however just behind the camera is a simple piece of sheet metal and an open soffit behind it, so nothing to secure it to. I saw on the cliff notes about how I could use a piece of metal underneath the soffit to mount it to but I was also thinking it might be possible to put a block of wood behind the aluminum wall of the soffit — it’s just if I do that there’s nothing to give it weight support on the bottom.. unless of course if I strap a piece of metal across the bottom… things that make you go hmmm.

 

[wittaj]

All you have to do is rotate the ball 90 degrees in that setup you have now.

 

[Lysdexik]

All you have to do is rotate the ball 90 degrees in that setup you have now.

Derp, I totally overthought that didn’t I.. thank you guys. Let me rotate it and then share some photos from today / tonight.

 

[Lysdexik]

Day photo

 

[looney2ns]

You need to get the siding on left mostly out of the FOV, either by moving the camera or zooming in enough to exclude the siding.
FYI: mounting cams higher than 8ft will mostly result in seeing mainly tops of heads.

 

[wittaj]

Much better, but you are such a tight spot that you will get IR bounce.

While I totally appreciate the need for wanting to see that whole side, if the IR bounce is too much, consider optically zooming the varifocal to just the spot between the two houses to minimize the side from either house.

Now of course the tradeoff is you won't see anyone come to the fence, but you would capture a better picture of them optically zoomed to the pinch point like this in red:



This would allow for a better chance of a clean capture of the face rather than the top of head as they get closer.

 

[Lysdexik]

Zoomed in a bit here, looks better for sure. You might even consider zooming in further? And yeah, not a huge issue losing some of the coverage below the camera -- I have another cam that covers the back yard.

As you can see the ladder is there so I can zoom and reposition without too much hassle based on any further recommendations

I also removed the overlays since Blue Iris does that for me, ha.

 

[Ri22o]

You have the ladder out, might as well set it at full rip and see how it looks.

A lot of people advocate for using the onboard overlays and disabling them in Blue Iris. One reason would be if you saved to the internal SD card for motion/IVS events, you wouldn't have the information available.

 

[Lysdexik]

You need to get the siding on left mostly out of the FOV, either by moving the camera or zooming in enough to exclude the siding.
FYI: mounting cams higher than 8ft will mostly result in seeing mainly tops of heads.

Yep, working towards that hah. Also I agree with what you're saying about capturing the tops of heads, none of my other cams are above 10ft there's actually no real reason that I can't lower this one down I was just trying to make it not stick out like a sore thumb.. although sometimes that's what you want.

You have the ladder out, might as well set it at full rip and see how it looks.

A lot of people advocate for using the onboard overlays and disabling them in Blue Iris. One reason would be if you saved to the internal SD card for motion/IVS events, you wouldn't have the information available.

That's a good point, there's no real reason that I can't switch back to using the onboard overlays -- especially since I'm already replacing/touching every outdoor cam with this refresh.

 

[wittaj]

Yep, working towards that hah. Also I agree with what you're saying about capturing the tops of heads, none of my other cams are above 10ft there's actually no real reason that I can't lower this one down I was just trying to make it not stick out like a sore thumb.. although sometimes that's what you want.

That is why I suggested optically zoom in to the pinch point between the two houses as that helps to "flatten" the angle and lets you get away with a little higher camera.

 

[Lysdexik]

That is why I suggested optically zoom in to the pinch point between the two houses as that helps to "flatten" the angle and lets you get away with a little higher camera.

Is there a way to zoom in to a specific spot other than the zoom slider that I don’t know about?

 

[Flintstone61]

Sometimes trying to use 1 camera in a location is too much of a compromise to having 2-3 cams doing the job more thoroughly.....

 

[wittaj]

Is there a way to zoom in to a specific spot other than the zoom slider that I don’t know about?

Nope just optically zoom it in and then manually adjust the camera if it needs adjusting.