Four of your five cameras are watching a fence.

the most common mistake in the whole category: a camera mounted directly above the door, aimed straight down at the mat. what that records is the crown of a hat and a pair of shoulders, for about a second and a half, at an angle no human face survives.

aim along the walk instead. you want somebody in frame while they're still coming toward you — from the sidewalk, the gate, the end of the drive. that gives you a whole person, moving: build, clothing, gait, and a face turned roughly toward the lens rather than roughly toward the floor.

cars, deliveries, and the thing that happens between the car and the front door. the mistake here is mounting high on the house and looking down, which flattens the whole scene into a top-down view where people become hats again.

mount so the camera looks along the drive — from the house toward the street, or from a corner across its length. you want the whole run in one frame: the vehicle, the walk from the vehicle, and the bit of pavement where boxes get left.

this is the one people skip, and it's the one i'd install second.

every house has a door or a window that can't be seen from the street, from a neighbour's kitchen, or from anywhere a person might casually be. a side gate behind a fence. a back slider screened by a hedge. a basement door down three steps in the dark. that's the entry that gets used, precisely because it's the one where somebody can stand and take their time.

and it's almost always the last spot to get a camera, because when you're standing at the front of the house with a box in your hand, you point the camera at the part of the house you look at every day.

i know. indoors is a hard no for a lot of people, and if it's a hard no for you, skip it — i'm not going to argue about it.

but if you're open to one: an interior camera at the choke point does more than any two exterior ones. every house has a spot everything funnels through — the hallway, the landing, the bottom of the stairs. close range, even light, no weather, no glare, no distance. that's where footage stops being a grey shape and starts being a description.

one camera. pointed at a corridor. not the living room, not a bedroom — a corridor.

this one isn't a compass direction. walk the property at nine at night and find the piece of it you cannot see from any window. that's spot five.

and here's the order that matters: light it before you film it. a motion light does more of this job than a camera does, because it changes what happens instead of recording it. a camera in the dark gives you infrared, and infrared gives you a person-shaped thing in monochrome. useful for knowing something happened. not useful for saying who.