Just read a photo forum post the other day about building a DIY 360 product photography equipment for spherical (or multi-row) photography. Spherical photography is interesting in that it allows you to rotate products in 360 degrees not just horizontally but vertically as well, giving you an impression that you rotate a product in any direction. To implement this kind of virtual 3D rotation, in addition to rotating your turntable you would also need to move you camera in a circular motion vertically.
Two companies that manufacture commercial grade machines for this type of product photography are Fotorobot in Europe and Ortery here in California, and as with any specialty market these tools are quite expensive (although Ortery has an edge on price vs functionality).
So one idea that immediately came up after reading the DIY forum question was to use our Mathew's C-stands with their steel arms and a couple of flexible grips that come with them. One steel arm would go between the C-stands and the other one, the boom arm, would be attached at the end of the first arm using adjustable grip at the end of that arm as shown on the images below. This grip can turn 360 degrees, essentially allowing you to position the second/boom arm above the turntable. Next step is to attach a camera onto the end of the boom arm and it's all set!
Then we would shoot one row at one angle, then turn the first arm (the one sitting between the C-sands) to another degree and shoot another row. Should be neat!
At this point this is just an idea and a quick one - though we will try it sometime soon and publish a report. Also, here's our recent post on building a DIY 360 product photography turntable that can be easily used for this setup.
BTW: we have few of these C-stands and the amount of flexibility is amazing...
UPDATE: Before we had a chance to experiment with this setup, Richard who brought up the question on fredmiranda.com had already tried it and with some promising results! Check out how he did it with images of his rig in the original forum post here.
