Here at WebRotate 360 we're against any form of recreational hunting.

This last project seemed typical - the shop needed a few 360 product photos of jackets, trousers, hats and some gadgets for their online store. Until I realized they also wanted to photograph a set of hunting rifles...

At first, I didn't know how to go about the setup and had to visit the store and see the guns up close. This was good enough to decide on the final approach: spin and shoot the rifles in an upright position so that they would spin around the barrel axis. Once images were ready, they could be flipped 90 degrees clockwise and presented in a horizontal layout inside a finalized 360 product view for further web placement.

When it comes to lighting setup, I always stick to the rule to not overdo it with the number of flash units. I try to stick to the principle of the London photographer David Bailey, who once said: "There is only one f**king sun!" With the 360 spin photography, it's not always possible to use a single flash but nevertheless, my setup was pretty simple as you can see in the above image.

I was not shooting this in my studio (it was done on the spot inside the store in a protected warehouse in Poland) so there was no way to make it perfect, but I knew that WebRotate's SpotEditor would make my "post" work easier so I didn't care too much about the background not being perfectly lit and that there was an incomplete background on the sides of the rifles.

I went with 40 photos per 360 spin so it's smooth when loaded inside the viewer and here's how I processed the images in  SpotEditor:

From camera (Canon 80D, 50mm macro, f11/125, JPG)

Created a path with start and end point

Applied and locked selected path to all images

Moved "Whites" slider to the left to overexpose the white background

Unchecked magenta alert

That's it! You can see a few examples of the work I did on this project on my website here: http://fotografia-360.weebly.com/knieja.html

I hope this will help some of you who will be shooting 360 product photography of long narrow products like these rifles. All in all, I'm very pleased with the results and the client was happy too.

Keep on Photographing!

Jacek Śliwczyński / Poland
Google Trusted Photographer

We have recently moved all posts from our old photogear360 blog here, so here's some related material you may find useful:

• 360 product photography upside down
• 360 product photography of Glock pistols
• Using suspension in 360 product photography (example 1)
• Using suspension in 360 product photography (example 2)
• White background in your 360 product photography projects
• DIY guide to building a manual 360 product photography turntable
• 360 product photography of large objects
• Mastering 360 product photography
• 360 product photography of flashlights

If you are just starting with 360 product photography, we often recommend to play with something simple like this DIY turntable or a similar "lazy susan" platform. Heck even a cake stand would do as a proof of concept. We shot hundreds of products for our commercial clients using that DIY table in the link so it works! Or you can get one of the many automated display stands on eBay that we see some folks re-sell for x2 the price as "360 product photography" turntables elsewhere (ha, right!).

The multi-row photography like the JVC example by Flipside Studios on our home page (click the 3D button there) is quite more involved though. The trick is to turn your camera around a product vertically in desired increments after completing each set (or row) of our usual 360-degree images.

[June 1, 2020] Check out this recent post on two-row 360 product photography that can be easier to implement.

So we recently solicited a couple of studio images from Richard George (Richard K. George Photography) who tested our original idea of a DIY multi-row 3d setup with some success:

Note the protractor at the end of the horizontal arm that holds the camera rig. The arm can spin inside the brackets producing the needed circular camera motion, and the fixed protractor is used to measure the angle increments.

This could be a good starting point if you want to test the waters with the 3d product photography. And once you get a feel for it and may be get a bigger project to shoot, you may consider professional equipment which often costs many thousands of dollars for similar functionality (ping us for referrals).

[June 1, 2020] an interesting approach you may also consider utilizes a vertical rail system with multiple cameras fixed to the railing, producing pretty much the same result. See this link with one such implementation at the Museum of African American History in Boston. While it may appear that this setup is quite more expensive, the time savings and consistency this should allow for is priceless.

WebRotate 360 Product Viewer has full support for the multi-row spherical and hemispherical photography with some advanced fine-grain control. To test the features, download our software here as well as this set of sample multi-row images (7 rows x 36 images) that were rendered in 3d modeling software and review these related posts:

First v3.6 Beta Release. Now With Full 3D Product Views
Download New v3.6 Beta Release (Build 3.6.0.542)
v3.6.2 Beta Released. Now with Incremental Zoom and More

Announcing the release of our revamped 360 product viewer integration for BigCommerce. This time it's geared specifically for the Stencil platform which is pretty much a new standard in the modern BigCommerce ecosystem (legacy Blueprint themes are still supported - more details).

Learning from our past experience with the Blueprint themes and given the lack of a reasonable front-end integration option that BigCommerce (c'mon guys!) can offer today to plugin developers, we really tried hard to make it as simple as possible without sacrificing much of the viewer capabilities. And we're happy to report that for the first time ever we now have an integration module for the hosted platform that is comparable to our more mature modules for self-hosted solutions like WordPress & WooCommerce or Magento.

If you're coming from Blueprint, here's what's new:

• No changes to your templates or stylesheets are necessary (usually). The integration will do its magic.
• No more mangling with the custom product fields which sometimes resulted in the odd viewer URLs getting stuck in the product description tabs. Just use the image description field (ALT) to enter the URL of your 360 product view configuration.
• No need to upload any integration files to your BigCommerce's WebDAV folder as we now host them for you on our servers. You may still upload the actual published 360 product images to your WebDAV but we don't recommend this anymore as BigCommerce's WebDAV folder is not optimized for image hosting (doesn't send cache headers). So you may need a separate hosting account for the images (Amazon S3 with CloudFront is a good option).
• New lightbox popup mode that allows placing a small clickable graphic anywhere on your product pages which activates a popup 360 product spin on click (comes with our new "Clean" popup theme).
• Master configuration is now available in BigCommerce so you can use a single viewer configuration for all of your 360 product views (PRO feature).
• API integration for unique enhancements using our extensive APIs (read more in our user guide under APIs or publish a test view by selecting the JavaScript API template on the Publish form in SpotEditor).
• Google Analytics integration will give you a snapshot of all major interactions by your site visitors within the viewer (PRO feature).
• It's fully responsive as now you can control how the 360 product viewer should change its height relative to the responsive viewer width as well as its minimum height to look good on small mobile screens.
• Supports multi-row 3D product views that can spin both horizontally and vertically.
• And a lot more that we packed into the core product viewer since the release of the Blueprint integration in 2013 (see version history).

All our integration modules are free!

To see an example and our guide to integrating WebRotate 360 Product Viewer with your Stencil themes, visit our new BigCommerce page by clicking this button:

Learn more

Happy to announce that we have released a refresh of our integration for PrestaShop 1.7. This release includes the latest viewer core from the recent push of WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3.6.2 (beta) and this means incremental zoom, new 3D product rotation mode and more.

Overall, if you are our PrestaShop user upgrading to PrestaShop v1.7, this integration release represents 2 years worth of development that went into WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3.6. And there has been a lot of development!

As with all recent integration updates, we added a dedicated PrestaShop plugin page with the installation and configuration instructions, plugin download links, version history and demo. This is where you can expect to see future releases, fixes, new demos and more... The latest version of the plugin has been also submitted to the PrestaShop marketplace and we're hoping it will be available there soon.

In addition to the update of the viewer core and the overall refresh of the plugin code, we added these new integraion options in the module dashboard in the PrestaShop admin:

• Google Analytics integration
• WebRotate API integration
• Minimum viewer height management
• New popup skin with vector graphics (Clean Light and Clean Dark).

Download