Most of what I know about how to photograph hail damage I learned by taking bad photos for about four years. Not blurry ones. Sharp, well-exposed, completely useless ones, where a mark I could see plainly with my own eyes at eighteen inches turned into a faint smudge on a homeowner's phone in a driveway. The mark was real. The photograph was not evidence of it.
A hail impact is a low-contrast subject on a rough surface in bad light. Nothing about that is friendly to a phone camera. You have to work at it, and the work is mostly habit rather than gear.
Light does more than your camera does
Flat overhead sun at one in the afternoon is the worst light there is. It fills every depression and flattens the surface into one even tone. The bruise you can feel with your thumb disappears.
Low, raking light is what you want. Early morning or late afternoon, sun coming across the slope rather than down onto it, so every depression throws a small shadow and every raised edge catches a highlight. On a roof I can shoot at seven in the morning, I get better documentation in twenty minutes than I would all afternoon.
When I cannot control the hour, I control the angle. I move so the light comes across my frame instead of over my shoulder. If the slope is in full shade, a phone flashlight held low and almost parallel to the surface does the same job. Six inches off the shingle, sweep it slowly, and texture appears.
How to photograph hail damage so it reads on a small screen
The core sequence never changes. Wide, medium, tight. Three frames.
The wide shot is the whole slope, from far enough back that the ridge and at least one edge are in frame. It answers "where is this." The medium shot is a section, maybe six feet across, carrying a landmark from the wide shot into it. The tight shot is the mark itself.
Skipping the first two is the most common mistake in the trade, and it is why so much hail documentation reads as unverifiable. A macro of a bruise with no surroundings could have come off any roof in the county.
For the tight shot, a few specifics that matter more than they sound:
- Get perpendicular. Square to the surface, camera parallel to the shingle plane. Angled shots distort the shape of a mark and make round things look oval.
- Ten to fourteen inches. Closer than that and most phones lose focus and cast their own shadow on the subject.
- Tap to focus, then tap to lower exposure slightly. Phones overexpose gray granules and blow out exactly the tonal range where granule loss shows.
- Never use digital zoom. Move your body. Zoom is crop plus guesswork.
- Take three. Storage is free and a reshoot means another trip up the ladder.
Scale, location, and marking
A mark with nothing beside it has no size. Put something known in the frame. A quarter works, a tape blade works better because it also gives you a distance, and a chalk line gives you both scale and a reference the viewer can follow across several frames.
Chalk is worth its own paragraph. I circle what I am about to shoot, because a circle in frame tells the viewer exactly what to look at, and because it survives into the wide and medium shots so they can track the same mark through the sequence. I write the slope and course count beside it. What I do not do is chalk in a way that alters the surface, and I say on camera that the chalk is mine and it is a marker, not a finding.
If I lay out a marked square to organize a count, I state the dimensions out loud and show the square in a wide frame before working inside it. The point of a square is that somebody else could lay out the same one in the same place and count the same things. That value evaporates if the square only ever exists in close-up.
Soft metals deserve the same attention. Gutters, downspout faces, vent caps, fascia wrap, and condenser fins all take an impression more legibly than a shingle does. Wide then tight, scale in frame, described without leaping to conclusions.
Wet the surface only if you say so
A light mist raises contrast on granule loss because bare mat holds water differently than a granulated surface does. It works. It is also a change to the thing you are documenting, so it goes in the record.
I shoot the area dry first. Then I say, on camera, that I am misting the section, and I shoot it again. Now the record contains both states and the reason for the second one. A viewer can weigh it however they like. What kills credibility is a set of photos where the roof is inexplicably wet in half of them and nobody ever mentioned why.
That is the principle behind every technique here. Anything you do to make a mark more visible is fine if it is disclosed and repeatable. Anything a reviewer would be surprised to learn about is a problem no matter how honest your intent was.
Words, not conclusions
The photograph shows the mark. What you say alongside it decides how the record reads.
Describe. "Circular depression approximately three quarters of an inch, granule loss at the center, mat exposed, soft to thumb pressure." "Impact bruising consistent with hail on the north face of the gutter." Location, size, appearance, texture. That is the vocabulary.
Then stop. What a mark is worth, whether it is covered, and what anybody should do about it are not questions a contractor answers, and in most states advocating a homeowner's claim without a public adjuster license is a crime. Coverage is between the homeowner and their insurer. If they want an advocate, that is a licensed public adjuster or an attorney. My photographs and my description of them are what I have to offer, and keeping them observational is what makes them useful to anyone.
All of this sits inside a larger habit: a fixed structure for the whole roof inspection record rather than good instincts on individual shots. Technique on one bruise does not save a disorganized record.
One last practical thing. Homeowners increasingly watch this happen live rather than seeing photos afterward, which changes the rhythm: you narrate as you frame, and the wide shot stops being an afterthought. Trades working that way are on the use cases page, and since this is footage of somebody's home, how the video is stored and who can open it is worth reading on the security page.
Learning how to photograph hail damage well is a week of deliberate practice and then a decade of not getting lazy about it. Build a clear record on the roof and you rarely have to defend it on the ground.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.