The impact of targeted training on the quality of photographic evidence in forensic medicine.

Accurate photographic documentation is of central importance in forensic practice, as depicting findings exactly as they appear is essential to ensure their use as evidence and to support legal certainty. In routine work, forensic photography is often performed under stressful conditions in which the documenting person must also identify findings, interpret them, and communicate them to investigators. These competing tasks can quickly divert attention away from careful photographic documentation, which may reduce image quality and limit their value for interpretation or legal use. This study examined whether targeted training can significantly improve the quality of forensic photography. 46 third year medical students without prior photographic experience were recruited and completed three photographic tasks on a training dummy: an overview image, a portrait image, and a detailed documentation of a wound. Two groups were formed and both received written instructions based on forensic photography guidelines, whereas only one group received additional training through a narrated presentation designed to highlight correct techniques and common errors (publicly available on GitHub). For each task, several quality criteria were assessed which could either be met or not. The results showed significant differences between the groups across several quality criteria, namely perspective, focal point and image composition for the overview image, perspective, focal point, format and focal length for the portrait image and focal length for the wound image with effect sizes between 0.36 (medium) and 0.62 (large). Furthermore, statistically significant differences were observed between the groups for the overall task and each of the individual tasks with p-values <0.001, although the corresponding effect sizes were relatively small (0.17-0.25). Overall, this study demonstrates that targeted training in forensic photography can substantially enhance image quality and, in turn, increase their reliability and usability as evidence.