General Police Photography

Instructors: Phil Sanfilippo & Keith Mancini
Course length: 24 hours

This 3-Day General Police Photography course will be of interest to police officers, investigators, technicians, and others who are tasked with photographic documentation related to law enforcement with the use of a digital single-lens-reflex camera. This course permits the photographer to gain an understanding of photographic techniques beyond the use of the automatic setting on the camera.

The General Police Photography course begins with presentations on the camera, its controls, and its settings as they relate to taking high-quality photographs that are properly focused and exposed. Stress is placed on techniques that will yield the best results for presentation in a court or other proceeding. Developing procedures to be used to increase productivity by the photographer will be discussed. These lectures will be followed immediately by exercises designed to reinforce their most important aspects. A presentation on the use of electronic flash will explain the various flash modes commonly used by forensic photographers. This too will be followed by a hands-on exercise.

More advanced lectures and exercises include applying photographic techniques to the documentation of crime scenes including low-light photography and photography of 3-dimensional evidence. There will also be a lecture and exercise on fingerprint photography.

Requirements

Students should bring the DSLR camera equipment (including cameras, lenses, and external electronic flashes) with which they normally work to the course. Please bring the owner’s manuals for cameras and flashes if available. Extra batteries and battery chargers are highly recommended. Tripods, flashlights, and lenses capable of close-focusing are also required.

Course Topics

Basic Photography (2 hours)
Digital Photography (2 hours)
Basic Photography Exercises and Review (4 hours)
Electronic Flash Techniques (1 hour)
Electronic Flash Exercise and Review (2 hours)
Composition for the Crime Scene (1.5 hours)
Painting-with-Light (1.5 hours)
Painting-with-Light Exercise (2 hours) – After Dark
Crime Scene Photography Exercise and Review (Review Painting-with-Light Photos) (4 hours)
Fingerprint Photography (1.5 hours)
Fingerprint Photography Exercise and Review (2 hours)
Course Review – Final Exam (.5 hour)

Phil Sanfilippo

With a law enforcement career spanned nearly 33 years, Phil Sanfilippo was employed by the Miami-Dade Police Department for over 30 years before retiring. He was also the Coordinator of Forensic Training Programs at the Miami-Dade Public Safety Training Institute, where he was responsible for administering the department’s Crime Scene, Fingerprint Identification, and other forensic related training courses.

Phil is an award winning forensic photographer, being named Nikon Evidence Photographer of the Year for 2003.

Keith Mancini

Keith Mancini has been a Forensic Photographer for the Westchester County, NY Forensic Lab for the past 22 years. He graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biomedical Photographic Communications (BioMed Photo for short).

Keith is certified as a Forensic Photographer and Forensic Video Examiner by the International Association for Identification. Keith is also a member of the National Institute of Justice’s Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC) Video and Image Analysis Subcommittee, and a member of the Scientific Working Group on Digital Evidence (SWGDE) where he serves on the Photography task groups.

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