When the summer heat rolls around, hunters know there aren’t many things better than looking at pictures from your trail camera and seeing a few stud bucks on it. Motion-activated camera technology has been around for a while now and are a great scouting tool for hunters to utilize during the offseason. But what if you have never used one before, where do you start? With so many options to choose from, it's hard to narrow it down to just one camera. Should you have more than one? What should be your strategy? Here are our 7 Commandments of Trail Camera Tactics to stop you from eating your tag at the end of the season.

1. Researching

Know the different products on the market. Every brand will have their flagship camera and other supplementary products to go under it. Start by setting a comfortable amount of money you are willing to spend and then start looking at whether you want to stick with a traditional camera or a cellular camera.

Traditional: Traditional cameras are the usual trail cameras that you have to walk out to retrieve the pictures from using an SD card. They are ideal for locations where they will be placed close to home or within areas you can easily sneak in and out of to retrieve.

Cellular: Cellular cameras utilize either a free or paid subscription plan allowing the camera to send photos via partner cellular networks. Pictures are either sent via email to your email address, or to a smartphone app for viewing. Cellular cameras are perfect for hunting locations that are far from home.

Once you narrow your decisions down to either traditional or cellular there are a lot more specifications and features you can look at, but most are pretty comparable when it comes to shutter speed, motion detection, battery life, etc.. But in my opinion, most trail cameras are great and produce good results. I’ve had budget cameras sometimes outperform the flagship cameras, but I also have had budget cameras crap out after a few weeks. It's ultimately your own preference.

2. Picking Prime Locations

We all know that scouting takes time, practice, and sometimes just dumb luck. Not everyone can be out in the woods 24/7 watching deer and patterning their movements. Most of us have jobs we have to work in order to provide for ourselves and/or our families. Which is why trail cameras should be a hunter's best friend. If used intelligently, you can make the camera(s) work for you. If you are looking to gain intel on a specific property here are some key prime locations to check out:

High Traffic: If you can find an area that has a main deer trail ripping through it, be sure to place a camera here. This is an easy place to put a camera and most of the time you’ll get great photos of the main herd in that area.

Remote Location: This is where you have to be creative. Go to that remote grouping of trees in the middle of that swamp or that perfect pinch point that is only accessible by water. These spots, while hard to get to, will sometimes have the best success rate of having that big buck show up on the camera.

Actual tree for hunting: Believe it or not, I’ve heard countless times of hunters posting up a trail camera on the actual tree their tree stand is in. It gives them a look at what is actually passing by their tree at any given time, and if on public land, it gives a little sense of security in hopefully warding off the stand thieves.

3. Installation

Now that you have a few spots in mind to place your camera(s) at, now it's time to think about installation. Since most of the hunting I do is on public land these tactics might not make sense for private land hunters who have better access to their trail cameras.

But, just like your entry and exit strategies for approaching and leaving your stand location, you now have to take those same strategies and apply them to installing and retrieving your cameras.

Throw out on a rainy day: This might be a debatable topic, but I find it to be a useful strategy. Waiting for a rainy day, or a time right before a good rainfall can be really helpful. Not only can you sneak into your location pretty easily, but also, scent control.

Scent control: Rain is a great way to control scent. No matter how much scent killer you spray, there will always be some scent left behind whenever to enter the woods. When rain falls it creates ions. These ions trap scents and smells much like the ozone generators widely used by treestand hunters.

There are others that argue that fresh rain heightens the deers’ smelling ability. This is always a fun debate to bring up as a friendly discussion as we did here.

4. Have a Network of Cameras

One question that always seems to come up when using trail cameras is “how many should you be using?”. There are polarizing arguments for both sides of the debate. Some don’t use trail cameras, and some run them religiously. In my opinion, it really depends on your situation. If the property you hunt is hundreds of acres, then having 20+ cameras makes a lot of sense, but putting out 20+ cameras on a 20 acres piece is a bit overkill. Having that happy medium where you are comfortable and still effective should be your ultimate goal. Here are a few reasons why having a network of trail cameras is so effective:

Helps Pattern: Summer months are a great time to get pics of specific deer on the property, but deer change patterns throughout the year. If you start running your trail cameras in mid-September, you’ll see that most of the bucks disperse into their fall core ranges so keep your cameras out until the end of October. With five to six weeks of surveillance, you’ll be able to pattern a buck or two!

Set different settings: Having thousands of trail camera pictures is great, but the time-intensive chore of looking through all of them can be exhausting (and exciting). To minimize time and for added “flavor”, switch a few of your cameras to using video mode. By taking a short video, instead of stills, you can actually see how deer react in that environment.

5. Enhance the location

Let's face it, sometimes your location might not be the best possible location, but you still want to know what kind of potential deer are in the location. One great way of achieving this is of course creating a bait site. A bait sight can consist of different enticing applications to attract deer.

If legal in your area, baiting deer with food plots mineral licks/pits can be an effective tactic. Not only will the added food and minerals draw local deer to the new site, but also it will aid in the growth and overall health of the deer.

If baiting is illegal in your area, a licking branch paired with a mock scrape is the perfect way to enhance the location. This setup is really easy to make, and I almost make one every time I hang a trail camera. Find a tree that you can break a smaller branch. The branch width should be around a pencil to thumb width. Snap the branch to let it hang down because you're looking for the tip of the branch to hang around 4-5ft off of the ground. Then under the branch, scratch the ground with either a stick or you boot to create a mock scrape. The mocks act as a “logbook” for deer. Whenever deer walk past them, they leave a scent on the branch from glands on their face and will often also urinate on the mock scrape as a means of communication with other deer.

Together they can make for a deadly combination for pulling deer in.

6. Position

Trail Camera technology has come a long way. Trigger speed, video, and detection time have all greatly surpassed the cameras from 10 years ago. But the way trail cameras detect something has not changed. According to a recent podcast we had with Exodus Trail Cameras, the most effective way to position a trail camera is directly downline of a deer trail (Listen here). For example, Imagine a clock. If a deer trail was running from 12 o'clock to 6 o’clock, you would want the camera pointing either from 12 pointing to 6, for 6 pointing to 12 (down the trail). While the argument can be made for other positions, this is what was prescribed as the “ideal placement”. But there are other variables to consider as well:

Tree Orientation: How many times have you pulled a camera and viewed its photos only to see a bunch of photos blurred out by the sun? This is because of the directional orientation in which the cameras were placed. These types of photos are almost always associated with cameras pointed to the East or West. To minimize this, I will always try to orientate my cameras facing to the north. By during this, the sun is constantly at the cameras back, thus preventing sun blurr.

Hang it higher: Over time I have appreciated the greater field of view by hanging trail cameras higher than 6ft. Not only are you increasing the viewing area (much like hunting in a treestand), but also you minimize possible theft if you are hunting public land. I will often bring a smaller portable climbing stick that fits in my pack to strap to a tree and hang my cameras higher and out of reach. Of course, if you don’t have sticks, just use a friend.

7. Maintenance

Finally, one of the most overlooked tactics people should be doing. We all work hard for what we have, and we all know the price tags of quality items. Why take the risk of allowing something that you paid for go to waste? Keep it clean, functioning, and organized.

Cleaning: Start with an inside-out approach. Examine the camera on the inside for dirt, debris, and corrosion ensuring to clean all before moving to the outside. Once the inside is clean, address the outside for the same. Manufactures will have guides and instructions on how to clean certain components so be such to read them before applying any solvents or chemicals.

Organization of photos: Nothing grinds me more than unorganized photos scattered everywhere on a hard drive. Have a sense of dignity, and organize your photos. I like to mine by month like this: (MM-YYYY).

Check Replaceables: Too often this mistake is made, not replacing the batteries before putting the camera out or not clearing the SD card of old photos before putting the camera out. Do yourself a favor, have some kind of method of marking your cameras for “readiness”. After I replace batteries and put a clean SD card in, I’ll mark it with a piece of colored tape over the latch to act as a “tamper seal”. Then when you are ready to hand it, you know that the camera is ready to go and all you have to do is remove the tape.

If you don't have any trail cameras out yet, now is the time to do so. Summer scouting is the perfect time to get those bucks on surveillance so you can start building a plan of attack. Use these 7 trail camera commandments to help ensure you are making the most of your offseason.

7 Commandments of Trail Camera Tactics and How to be Successful