Here's a quick tip on how to work around one of those issues that we often have to deal with when photographing reflective products, which is especially applicable to our 360 product photography.

If we take a cell phone or an iPad or a similar product with a reflective screen and place it on our turntable "as-is", and then try to shoot it straight such that our camera points straight towards the screen, we will notice immediately that our turntable can be distinctively seen as a  white curvy reflection on the product screen. The table reflection will stay there on the screen on pretty much all 360 product shots where the screen is visible as light from our lighting will bounce of the turntable and will reflect straight to our camera via reflective surfaces on the product. This is pretty much impossible to avoid as we still need plenty of light around our product and any kind of a bounce or reflective card we would use to block the light may not let us to eliminate the reflection completely. Not to mention the time required to properly adjust the bounce card for 10-15 images, which is a daunting task on its own.

The answer to this problem is pretty straightforward - we just need to raise the product above our turntable just enough to hide the reflection for our chosen camera angle. It may require some additional work as mounting a product above the table will often require building a custom base that has to fit and hold the product in a desired configuration. We have been using solid wooden blocks that we would cut into different shapes and that worked great. With wood though you have to be sure to wrap it up in some sort of white tape or white paper to ensure that it doesn't produce a yellowish cast on your product images. Recently we started using Styrofoam and it works much better as it's easier to cut and we don't need to worry about the color cast as it's pretty much neutral light Grey. You can get various shapes and sizes of Styrofoam blocks in your local arts and crafts store or order online.

Of course if you have 360 product photography equipment that allows you to mount and rotate a product from the top, this is not an issue. From our experience though most of electronics with reflective surfaces and similar products have to be shot upright mounted on a turntable one way or another.

Here's a few images to better illustrate the problem and our solution:

The curvy glass frame is sitting right on the turntable and we can clearly see its reflection:

Let's now cut a Styrofoam stand with a narrow platform just enough to hold the thin glass frame:

Now the table reflection is gone on all 360-degree images:

Adobe has released another excellent survey of their Scene7 customers. For those of you who are not familiar with Scene7, it's a great tool or rather a service by Adobe that helps companies incorporate and manage rich media content on their websites. Serving big clients such as Sears and Macy's their price entry is steep with an yearly charge of 30-40K for publishing and managing rich media catalogs online.

The survey was conducted from November 9, 2009 to January 15, 2010. It covers a variety of industries across major markets: North America, Asia-Pacific, Western/Eastern Europe, Middle East , Africa, and Latin America. It's a 60 page document that goes into pretty good details evaluating how different industries/markets plan to adopt latest trends in digital media in 2010 with a primary focus on Interactive Rich Media, Social Media, Mobile Features and Personalization. Total of 546 companies have provided their feedback.

Here's what we found most interesting:

• Current adoption of 360-degree product views is still very low. Only 7% of all responders have adopted this feature. Though, unsurprisingly, its planned adoption growth in 2010 is highest across all 21 rich media features evaluated. 22% of all responders plan to adopt 360 product images in 2010. This is a 200% increase! Combined with 3-D visualization that shows second fastest growing adoption rate (9% adopted vs 23% planned) and product tours (13% adopted vs 23% planed) we think we have a busy year ahead of us. To give you a comparison point, well established functionality such as Quick Looks/Rollover views and Alternative Images show marginal adoption growth with 20% adopted vs 21% planned and 17% adopted vs 18% planned respectively.
  
• Product tours (combinations of guided spin, zoom imagery, videos or animations with copy) is ranked highest in effectiveness across all rated rich media features.
  
• 27% more responders said that 360 product spin is a most effective feature to drive conversion/sales comparing to similar survey last year.
  
• 70% of survey participants in North America have less that 10 million in annual sales with quarter of all responders being interactive/advertising agencies.

It's great to see companies embracing interactive rich media, and while e-commerce is still in its infancy (Forrester research says only 8% of all sales will be done online in 2014), the trend is clear and this survey only reassures that we are on the right track.

You can request a full copy of the survey here.