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You probably have some kind of camera around the house. It is about all the equipment you need to get started in the hobby of collecting photographs of automobile accidents. Of course, you must have your camera with you everyday, and you must share your hobby with insurance men and lawyers if your legal photographs are to help you gain those extra dollars each month.

When I leave for work in the morning, my wife does not say, "Don't forget your lunch, dear."

"Don't forget your camera," she says.

I GOT into this hobby in St. Louis, Missouri, quite by accident. No one was injured, but we were all shaken up a little. You should have seen my neighbors' car and the repair bill!

Henry and his wife had taken us to a picnic and on the way back a heavy convertible went through a boulevard stop and almost through Henry's car. The other driver wobbled out of his slightly wrinkled juggernaut breathing alcohol fumes and angry threats. Ignoring the profanities, Henry looked over the demolished side of his car, with the other fellow following step for step repeating over and over again that the accident was all Henry's fault.

"If you only had your camera, Bob," said my wife.

I was thinking of the same thing as I walked shakily into a super drug store on the corner by the boulevard stop. The clerk at the camera counter sold me two rolls of film and said he would loan me a new box camera for ten minutes if the manager would okay my request.

We found our man outside admiring the artistic dents in the cars along with the rest of the crowd of onlookers.

"Go ahead and use it," he said. "Want me to hold some of these people back a minute?"

After the close pictures, I asked him if there was a way of getting up on the second or third floor of the drug store building for some views showing the accident scene and the boulevard stop.

We shot from different windows on the second and third floors. In a day or so Henry's insurance adjuster dropped around to see the contact prints I had made. He gave me a check for $60 and asked me to let him have all the negatives.

My wife bought a new leather bound scrapbook and pasted the accident prints in and we added appropriate captions. Within a week we were putting prints of another accident into the album, and we realized we had a new hobby and that it was going to do more than pay for itself.

AS THE bus was taking me home from work one afternoon I noticed a crowd of people milling around a car and a grocery store with a broken show-window. Around my neck I had my 35mm. Robot camera, while at home just a few blocks further, I had my larger cameras and flash equipment. Maybe my Ciro-Flex with its 120-size film would be better, I thought.

When I got back to the scene, I saw that it had been a two-car accident, and that a wrecker was about to haul away one of the cars.

"Hey!" I shouted, as the driver started to put his tow truck into gear, "How about setting her down until I shoot a couple for the insurance company?" I gestured with my camera.

"Okay, but shake it up, will you?"

After I had photographed the damaged and undamaged sides of the car, I took one of my business cards out of my wallet. On it I wrote, "Please give this to your insurance man, I have photographs of your accident," Then I attached the card to the steering wheel with a rubber band.

Next, I backed away and made a shot of the other car and the grocery store with the shattered window. In some shots, I included the lamp post with the name plate of the street and also the tire marks on the street showing the direction taken by each car and the point at which each of them had applied their brakes. Closer in, I photographed the other car on three sides, using a flash bulb in one picture to show damage in a shaded area under the car.

Inside the grocery store, from the top of a high ladder, I made a couple more shots. They showed the internal damage as well as the wide open place where the window had been. Through this opening, I also managed to show the car which was just outside.

Now with this sort of accident situation, you do not kill the profit possibilities of the picture series by merely selling them to one or the other of the three insurance companies involved. You sell the picture you took from the inside of the store twice before you even receive a visit from agents of car or the plate glass insurance companies.

You sell one shot for $5 to the neighborhood newspaper, and for the same sum you sell the picture again to the picture editor of Food Topics or some other magazine which goes to retail grocers. If you do not know the address of the magazine you can ask the grocer to let you see a copy of it which he'll be bound to have around the store somewhere.

SUPPOSE YOU have just shot some pictures of an automobile accident. You are wondering about the amount of legal tender that will be coming your way. You have just returned from the drugstore or your own darkroom with a fist-full of pretty good photographs. You even have a couple of shots you took while perched uncomfortably on the side of a telephone pole.

One of them is blurred . . . you were nervous. But the other is very sharp. It shows plainly who was in the wrong lane when the two radiators met and started throwing water around. You gave your name and address to the woman driving the blue car and the teen-ager with the hot-rod. How much should you ask for the pictures?

My minimum asking price per photograph when only two or three are likely to be bought is $10 each. After the first three the price drops down to $5 each. I give the buyer an eight-by-ten-inch print on double-weight paper. If you are not doing your own darkroom work, I am sure that five-by-seven enlargements from the drugstore would do just as well. Usually the buyer will also want the negatives because he does not want them to fall into the hands of the opposition. I always hold onto my negatives until the agent has agreed to pay the price I want for the pictures.

Frequently an agent will look at your pictures without enthusiasm and say he might be interested in buying one or two. Then he may say that his company only permits him to offer you $2 or $3 apiece for them. Take my word for it, this lad is playing it cagey, and his bluff should be called if you are thinking of buying your wife a fur coat.

IF YOUR pictures will help place blame for the accident on the policyholder of a rival insurance firm, then they are cheap at any reasonable price you ask. Your prospective investor is well aware of this.

I recall an accident involving a panel truck which rammed a car driven by an elderly lady. She suffered some bruises, contusions, and general nervous shock. At the time of the collision, my wife and I were in a furniture store looking for a lamp. We heard the impact from about a block away.

Before the crowd built up too deeply around the cars, I took the usual ground level shots, then took some more from the third floor of a rooming house at the corner. In one picture I managed to show the position of the truck and car, and it showed a warning sign reading, "Dangerous Intersection."

Before the agent from the victim's insurance company came to see me, I enlarged three of the best negatives to eight-by-ten size. With these three he would not have too much trouble persuading the opposition to make a quick out-of-court settlement for car repairs and hospitalization. I felt that $30 for the three photographs was an uncommonly reasonable price. (Usually when any drivers or passengers are injured, the pictures are actually worth much more than $10 each because of the strong probability that the case will go to court and huge damages may be demanded.)

The frugal minded gentleman from the insurance company beat me down to $20 for the lot after some friendly bluffing back and forth. He handed me the check and I handed him the three prints, "And the negatives?" he said, eyeing me.

"Five dollars each, if you can use them," I replied, busying myself with some papers on my study table.

He stood there breathing a little hard for a moment, then wrote another check which brought the value of the three photos up to $35. He could have had them, negatives and all, (for $30) if he had not haggled me down to $20 in the first place.

DON'T FEEL badly if you do not always get your asking price. For every "success story" I know another tale with another name.

An example would be the day a carload of pretty young telephone operators tangled fenders with a car containing one bassoon player. I was on my way to work, but I decided to get off the bus at the next stop. In stories involving bassoon players, they usually get the blame, but this time the fault was with the "voice with the smile" at the wheel of the other car.

I shot my pictures, left my address and caught the next bus.

Later the same day, my wife and I were returning from a movie in my car. My headlights showed a group of people around two cars, one of which was on the wrong side of the street.

Believe it or not, I not only had the Robot with me, but also a flashgun and a sleeve of number five flash bulbs. In spite of the heavy night traffic, I backed away from the cars one at a time and shot my pictures. By the way, if you ever have to do this at night, and out-of-doors, open your camera shutter wider than the instructions on the flash bulb wrapper.

I have found that when the bulbs have nothing to bounce their light around on, they tend to deliver less light back inside your camera than you are used to in indoor shooting.

Our bassoon player paid me a visit in a couple of days. Unfortunately I had been lazy and had not yet developed the film. As soon as he left, I busied myself with the films and made eight-by-tens of both accidents. The next day the insurance people who had insured the car belonging to the telephone girl came around.

He looked at the photos and grunted unhappily.

I cleared my throat and mumbled about my basic price per picture.

"Who needs them?" he growled with a wry smile. All they show is that my company is going to have to pay a nice big repair bill.

The moral to that story is simple enough: Print your pictures pronto. Had they been ready in time, the bassoonist or his agent would have contributed to operation profitable hobby.

THE SECOND chapter to this dismal tale is almost as sad.

I'm not even sure who is the villain in it, myself or the adjuster who called to see me about the after-hours accident. One of the parties involved, he told me, was attempting to defraud his company with an injury claim. In the first place, he felt that the injury had occurred before the accident, and in the second place, he felt sure that with a little luck it could be proved that his company was not liable.

If the threatened suit got into court and the insurance company lost, the bill for personal and property damage would be anything but modest. In addition there would be the usual attorney fees and court costs.

Before we got around to "how much?" the adjuster and I were in perfect accord. The pictures might be very helpful to him, he said. We agreed on the state of the weather and about how nice it would be to take off some day soon and go fishing instead of keeping the old proboscis against the knife-sharpener.

Then I spoiled everything, when in answer to his question, I said three bad words.

They were, "Ten dollars per . . ."

He wanted them for $3 but would pay $5 apiece. This was not enough, I felt, to pay me for carrying my camera day and night in the service of his and other insurance firms. What if the word got around that I was giving away what I used to sell? I thought about the fish hideaway he said he knew about, but I hardened my heart.

My hands and eyes were intent on my job of shuffling through the disorder of papers on my study table. Two little voices inside me began whispering.

"All or nothing at all," said the first voice.

"Remember that we're just trying to help people. It's a hobby, remember?" scolded the second voice.

"Aw c'mon," said a third voice. It was my ex-potential fishing companion. In a burst of unsuspected generosity he raised the bid a dollar to $6 each.

As I took his check and handed him the pictures, I felt like I'd been an accomplice in the robbing of a widow and her orphans.

SEVERAL DAYS later I made the lawyer for the other side of the affair very unhappy when he made a belated call to see if he could get the same pictures. I'm sure he'd have shed his nylon shirt and burglarized his son's piggy bank for even a brief look at the contact prints I had of the same pictures in my scrapbook.

Ethics prevented me from even mentioning them, since I sell my photographs to only one of the parties involved, usually the one who asks for them first. You have to play square with your clients if you are to continue shaving. That fellow in the mirror and you have to stay on friendly terms. No one needs to feel any hesitation about taking accident pictures even though the victims may be stretched out dead and dying as you do.

The pictures which you take may save someone from a trip to the penitentiary for manslaughter, or they may help fix the blame on some person who has been guilty of criminal negligence. There have been many cases in which confused, witnesses have been cross-questioned about accidents months after they have occurred, and there have been injustices.

Your photographs show what really happened after the cars stopped rolling. Tire marks, pieces of glass or water from the radiator may show the paths taken by the motorists. If you have enterprise enough to carry a camera every day even though you may only photograph one or two accidents some months, you are entitled to any small fees you charge.

Ten dollars is not much to ask for a legal picture when you stop to think that some legal pictures have cost as high as $50 to $100 each!

Just before I began this article, I began my third scrapbook. As I pasted in the photographs, I thought about how my hobby has helped me to become a more careful driver. When you have photographed as many four-wheeled accordions and coffins as I have, you learn to be careful for yourself and for the other driver who may be reckless.

If you have the stomach for such a violent hobby as this phase of legal photography, you can start tomorrow, if you have some kind of a camera. After safety talks which I give occasionally, I am sometimes approached for advice on photographing accidents. Most of the advice is to be found somewhere in this article.

There is one piece of advice which will bear a little repetition, I believe.