How to Place Your Trail Cameras for Maximum Success

Question: It’s time to deploy my trail cameras for deer season. What are your tips for trail-cam placement? — J. McClure, via email

Answer: When it comes to trail-camera placement, most folks think about the areas where they plan to place cameras — food plots, field corners, heavily used deer trails, scrapes, bedding areas, etc. Obviously, where you place your cameras is extremely important; after all, you can’t catch a great buck on camera if you don’t have a camera where he lives! But in this response, I want to focus on how you place your cameras in the field. This is almost as important as where you place them, and you can put this advice to good use no matter where your cameras are.

First, you need to think about the direction you point your cameras. Everyone knows the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, yet it’s amazing how many folks set up cameras pointing those directions. The result is photos that are blown out and filled with glare in the mornings (for eastern-facing cameras) or evenings (for western-facing cameras). This can really make it hard to see what you’re looking at in your photos, which is a problem if you’re trying to judge the age of a buck or figure out how many points it has. You’re much better off pointing your cameras north or south to avoid the solar glare.

Second, think about camera height and distance from anticipated deer activity. Regarding height, somewhere between three and five feet off the ground is generally best, though there are instances when it makes sense to place cameras higher and angle them downward to keep them out of the direct line of sight of deer and other hunters. As for distance, I’d recommend setting up your cameras roughly 10 yards from where you expect the deer to be. That’s far enough to capture the entire animal but still close enough to let you see lots of detail.

One thing you’ll discover when attempting to follow these tips is that there’s often no suitable tree, fence post or other mounting location where you need it. In wooded areas, the trees will often be too big, too small or leaning at the wrong angle to work with the standard camera strap. And in open areas such as food plots, there is often nothing at all to support your camera. I run a small fleet of Moultrie Mobile cameras, and Moultrie offers a variety of dedicated mounts such as the EDGE Series FLEX MOUNT 2 and EDGE Series CAMERA STAKE that eliminate these problems, making installing and aiming my cameras quick and easy. I keep a couple FLEX MOUNT 2s handy in my camera pack, as the vertical and horizontal adjustability lets me mount a camera virtually anywhere. For plots and ag fields, the CAMERA STAKE is a perfect, free-standing option that can accommodate two cameras or a camera and a solar panel. Moultrie also offers several universal mounting options that work with any camera tapped for a standard ¼x20 thread mount.

Once you have your camera installed and properly aimed, capture a couple test images to ensure everything is working properly, including connecting to the network if you’re using a cellular camera. Last but not least, take note of any limbs, leaves, grass or brush close to your camera and remove them if possible. Otherwise, they will reflect the camera’s flash when capturing nighttime images and cause a blowout effect that results in images that are overexposed in the foreground but very dark and hard to see where the deer are standing.

Follow these tips, and you’ll spend less time moving and adjusting cameras this summer and more time enjoying photos and videos of the deer you’ll be hunting this fall!