The roof is where damage is alleged. The attic is where it is proved.
It is also the part of the job most likely to get a token pass — three frames from the hatch, insulation and a rafter, nothing anybody can locate later. Twenty minutes up there produces the most decisive material in the file, and the reason it gets skipped is not that inspectors do not know this. It is that attics are hot, dark, tight, and full of ways to put a foot through a ceiling.
Before you go up
Establish where you are. An attic photograph with no orientation is nearly worthless, because every attic looks like every other attic in a close-up.
I shoot the hatch from below, then from inside looking back at it, then a wide frame along the ridge line. That gives every later frame something to anchor to. Then I fix a direction convention out loud — "front of house is north, I am working north to south" — and hold it for the whole pass.
Footing before anything: joists only, never insulation, never decking between joists. Bring your own light rather than relying on the phone, because a phone lit by its own torch produces flat gray frames of everything.
The shooting order
Work it as a sequence so the record has a shape:
- Ridge and rafters, wide, both directions, to establish the volume and the framing
- The underside of the deck in overlapping frames along each slope — this is the main event
- Every penetration: plumbing stacks, bath and kitchen fans, flues, chimney chase, skylight curbs
- Valleys from beneath, which is where concentrated water shows first
- Eaves and soffit, including whether insulation is blocking ventilation
- Any mechanical up there, and the condition of its ducting and drain pan
- Insulation, wide and at depth, with a tape in frame if it is compressed or wet
What you are actually looking for
Daylight where there should not be daylight. That is the simplest and most persuasive finding an attic offers, and it photographs poorly unless you kill your own light and let the camera adjust. I turn the torch off, wait, then shoot.
Staining is the other main one, and staining has a vocabulary. A dark ring with a defined edge and a lighter center is old and dry. A uniformly dark, soft-edged patch is likely active. Rust streaking below a fastener says water has been tracking there repeatedly. Mineral deposits at a nail point are a history of condensation, not necessarily a leak.
Get the tight frame, but get it with a landmark — a stack, a truss plate, a rafter you can count from the gable. And use a moisture meter if you carry one, with the reading in frame. A number turns "it looked damp" into an observation someone else can weigh.
Condensation deserves its own attention, because it is the most misread thing in an attic. Uniform frost or dampness across a whole slope, worst near the ridge, on a cold morning, in an attic with blocked soffits — that is usually a ventilation problem rather than a roof failure. Photograph the soffit blockage and the frost in the same sequence and the story tells itself.
Describe, and stop
Same discipline as the roof. Location, extent, appearance, moisture reading.
"Dark staining on the underside of the deck, north slope, approximately four feet down from the ridge and two rafter bays east of the chimney chase. Roughly eighteen inches across. Meter reads elevated at the center, dry at the margin. Daylight visible at the chase flashing."
That is a finding. What it means for a claim is not yours to say, and saying it is how a good record turns into an unlicensed opinion.
Attic frames are also the ones that pay off hardest when a homeowner is watching live, because the underside is somewhere they have almost certainly never been and could not evaluate from a still photograph. Narrating a stain while pointing a light at it is worth ten captioned images — and it works from the driveway on their own phone, which matters in a space where two people plus equipment does not fit. How the live viewer flow works covers the mechanics.
The rest of the photographic discipline — sequences, scale, naming — is in the inspection photo checklist. The attic is where it is hardest to keep and where it counts for most.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.