The storm comes through at two in the afternoon, the ice is gone by three, and at lunchtime the next day you walk out, look at the garage door and see nothing wrong with it. Then at a quarter past five the sun drops behind the house across the street, and the same door looks like the surface of a golf ball.
Nothing happened to the door between lunch and five. The light changed. That difference is the whole of this article, and it matters because the photographs you take in the first few days after a storm are usually the only record anyone will ever have of what that storm did.
Why a dent disappears at noon
A hail dent on a steel door is a shallow dish pressed into the skin. The paint is usually unbroken and the colour has not changed, so there is nothing for your eye to see except shape, and you only see shape through shadow.
When the sun is high, or the sky is overcast, light arrives at the door from roughly straight on or from everywhere at once. A shallow dish in that light casts no shadow and throws no highlight. It is there and it is invisible.
Raking light is light arriving almost flat along the surface. In that light every dent has a lit far edge and a shadowed near edge, and forty dents that were invisible become forty small crescents. Photographers of old paintings use the same trick to find brushwork and repairs, for the same reason.
Finding the right light for your door
It depends almost entirely on which way the garage faces.
- West-facing: late afternoon, in the last hour or so before the sun goes behind the houses opposite. This is the easy one.
- East-facing: early morning, shortly after sunrise, for the same reason in reverse.
- South-facing: the sun crosses the door rather than rising in front of it, so mid-morning and mid-afternoon both give you a low angle from one side. The sun sits lower in October than it did in July, which helps.
- North-facing: it may never get direct raking sun at all. Wait for dusk and use a flashlight.
The flashlight method works on any door and is the one we would use if you only try one. After dark, hold a bright torch flat against the face of the door near one edge, pointing along the panel rather than at it, and photograph from the opposite end at a shallow angle. Every dimple in the beam’s path shows up. Move along one section at a time.
The photographs that actually help
An adjuster or a door company wants to be able to answer three things from your pictures: which door, how much damage, and when. So shoot for those.
- A wide shot showing the house, the door and something that places it, such as the house number.
- Each section on its own, top to bottom, in raking light.
- Close-ups with a scale in frame. A coin or a tape measure held against the panel turns “some dents” into dents of a known size.
- The model label inside the end stile at the edge of a section, while you are standing there anyway.
- Other soft metal on the same side of the house. Gutters, downspouts, the fins on an outdoor AC unit and a metal mailbox dent in the same storm, and pictures of them put the door’s damage in context.
Do not filter, crop or edit the originals. Your phone records the date and time each picture was taken, and an untouched original keeps that intact. Copies for sending can be whatever you like.
Why the photographs come before anything else
Once a section has been swapped or a dent has been worked on, the evidence is gone, and a door that has been straightened is very hard to document afterwards. The camera goes first, then the phone call to the insurer, then any decisions about the door.
We are not insurance people and your policy is the authority here, including how long you have to report a loss. It is worth finding that page in the same week as the storm rather than the same week as the renewal.
Fall hail, and the baseline almost nobody takes
Hail in North Texas is mostly a spring event. It is not only a spring event, and the fronts that start arriving in October can bring it. That creates a particular problem for doors that were hit in April and then hit again in the fall: two storms, one door, and no way of telling which dents came from which.
The answer costs nothing. On a clear evening when nothing has happened, go out with the flashlight and photograph the door section by section. That is your baseline. If a storm comes through in November, the new pictures can be compared against it, and “new damage” becomes something you can show rather than something you have to argue.
If the door already has old dents, the baseline matters more, not less. Keep the pictures somewhere that is not the phone they were taken on, because the phone is the thing most likely to be replaced between one storm and the next.
The money question
No prices, and photographs cost nothing, which is rather the point.
What your pictures will eventually feed is a decision about sections: how many are damaged, whether they are still straight, and whether the model is still made. That decision is covered in our earlier post on hail and the track. The photographs are what let that conversation happen with the same facts in front of everyone, including you.
What not to buy
- Do not buy a new door because the photographs look dramatic. Raking light exaggerates. It is supposed to. A door that looks ruined at dusk can be structurally perfect, and whether a section is still straight is a separate check from whether it is dented.
- Do not buy any repair before the photographs exist. Including a well-meaning one from a neighbour with a suction cup.
- Do not buy a special camera. A phone and a flashlight do this better than most people expect, because the light is doing the work.
The short version
Hail dents show up in low light and vanish in high light. Photograph the door when the sun is skimming across it, or after dark with a torch laid flat against the panel, and do it before anything is touched. Then take one more set on a quiet evening so the next storm has something to be compared with.
None of this involves us, which we are aware is an odd thing to publish on a garage door company’s website. The pictures are yours, and they are worth more than any quote we could give you in the same week.
Garage Doors Pro Service · (469) 693-9000 · garagedoorsproservice.com
Serving Dallas, Plano, Frisco, McKinney and the DFW metro.
