In this guest blog post our friend, an Australian product photographer Bary Daly, is sharing his 360 photography setup that they used to capture 360 product images of several scooters for one of their clients. 

I shot 4 mobile scooters last year for a company here in Melbourne. I did it here in my small studio which would be a 6 m x 4 m. The scooters are very heavy so it took 2 people to get them in then lift them up on the turntable.

I have a very unsophisticated set up. I used 3 direct light heads with five (28watt fluorescent colour temperature 5000k-5500k) bulbs in each head. These lights plus reflectors on both sides of the scooter and at the back was all the light needed.

I used direct lights because flash lights make the rotation flicker as there is a slight difference in power output between each flash. To keep the perspective of the scooter right I positioned the camera as far back as possible with a 105mm lens. The aperture also needs to be at least f16 to give sharp definition to the scooter from back to front. I focused on the front then set to manual so it would not change as the scooter spins. At f16 the shutter needs to be dragged to get the best exposure I’m not sure exactly what it was but the camera needs to be on a tripod.

The top part of the turntable is marked 24 evenly around. I did this by putting masking tape around the top of the turntable then peeling it off measuring it and dividing it by 24. 24 images works well for large items smaller products need more images per rotation to make them look smooth.

Once the 24 images are complete a clipping paths is done for each image to knock out the background and fill it with white. I’ve also added a reflection on the tires to enhance the perception of depth.

This set up works well for most large items. The turntable is home made using 2 pieces of scrap woods with a 12 inch Lazy Susan bearing in between. It can take quite a bit of weight also. Live models also works well with this setup.

See the completed 360 product view here: http://www.see360degrees.com.au/scooter1-net.html

Bary Daly is a manager and a photographer at See 360 Degrees in Melbourne, Australia. His company offers a unique service based on the wealth of experience in product photography to truly make your products stand out. Visit their website for more information and check out their blog for more 360 photography samples and resources.

Like blogging? PhotoGear 360 is looking for guest bloggers who would like to share 360 product photography tips and tricks on this blog. Just send us an email to support at photogear360 dot com.

High quality professional 360 photography equipment isn’t exactly cheap, so if you are just starting or on a budget and have only a few products to shoot, it might be easier to start with something simple like our DIY 360 photography turntable. Not only we enjoyed building ours, we have been successfully using it in a few dozen of commercial projects.

Almost the same DIY solution is presented in this video below by ResaleRenegade. It’s a good video with clear instructions – definitely worth watching. This 360 turntable can be even converted into a motorized rotating platform! So consider building your own, export your 360 product images into WebRotate 360 Product Viewer and start generating more business!

In 2019 we have launched PixRiot which is an optimized hosting service for 360 product views. It provides simple drag & drop uploads and sharing using a variety of options, including iFrame. It can be used with all of our plugins and the standard SpotEditor output. Information below is outdated. We suggest using PixRiot instead.

Here’s a cool new utility for all of our users. Imagine you can have your own hosting service for your 360 product photography and let your clients use your 360 product views by simply pasting a simple YouTube style sharing code onto their pages. Now this becomes possible thanks to a simple sharing script from WebRotate 360 that you can upload online in addition to the actual 360 views like you would usually do with our 360 photography software.

Checkout this great sample by VIVA Sanitary in UK who use this tool to let resellers show off their innovative bathroom products in a gorgeous 360 degree rotation. Note the small download arrow under the 360 view on the right. If you click on it, there’s the sharing code that can be used on any website to load exactly the same 360 degree spin from VIVA’s website in the same way you would embed a YouTube video on your own webpage.

Here’s the scoop:

• Download this new WebRotate 360 Sharing script (as of Dec 22, 2014 it uses our latest release of WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3.5).
• Unzip and upload everything somewhere on your hosting server (via FTP for example).
• Note the location of the file called clientpage.html in the upload and load it in your web browser (i.e. from your web server where it was just uploaded).
• You will see the usual WebRotate 360 sample shoe – this is pretty much it!

What you are looking at is a test page with nothing else but the sharing (embed) code. It looks like this:

<iframe src="viewloader.html?sku=sampleshoe&wd=500&ht=500" width="500" height="500" frameBorder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Right now this page is still located on your hosting web server / FTP (it’s just a sample) - to actually give this code to your clients to use on their own web pages, all you need to do is change viewloader.html to include the full URL to this file on your hosting server so it would look something like this:

<iframe src="http://yourhostingsite.com/viewloader.html?sku=sampleshoe&wd=500&ht=500" width="500" height="500" frameBorder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Then just replace sampleshoe with the name of a folder that you will upload under sharedviews for each of your 360 degree product view – what you upload there under sharedviews is exactly the same single folder that is created on publish via SpotEditor under 360_assets (check this video for more details about publishing and output folder structure).

You can change width and height to the dimensions of the 360 viewing box that your client will prefer to see on their page or even let them play with these dimensions on their own - the 360 product view will re-scale automatically! Most webmasters will immediately understand what’s going on and appreciate the simplicity of this simple embed code.

Now you can be your own 360 product photo hosting service for your clients.

Here’s an another interesting find – a gallery of studio images from the hemispherical 3D photo-shoot by Almont Green at the museum of African American History in Boston. Just click on the image above to see all of the awesome details at his improvised studio. You see, the hemispherical multi-row photography is a much trickier process than our standard 360 degree spins that you would usually see on the ecommerce websites. And shooting multi-row photography for a major museum is even more challenging since the items cannot be removed from the site and the setup has to be built right there at the museum. Not to mention the responsibility of having to move these items back and forth..

In this great example, Almont approached the problem by building his custom photo rig with multiple cameras attached to a curvy poll as well as a manual 360-degree turntable. The system captures what we think is 8 rows of 360 degree images (by the number of attached cameras) and each row seems to be composed of 36 images total, judging by the manual markings on the custom made turntable that you see in some of the photos.

So each individual camera is fixed at its precise angle that was calibrated using the center of the turntable and the hanging weight. Then all of the cameras are triggered (hopefully at once) to capture 8 rows of images for each step of the turntable. The rig looks very light and well-built and seems quite portable. I’m still wondering whether the continuous lights used hot halogen bulbs or the cool daylight ones as there’s a lot of them there and and it can make the work quite uncomfortable if it’s the hot bulbs.

Also note how Almont arranged the two rows of lights on each stand where one row just shoots straight at the background and the other lights up the object – this is a really portable setup unlike what we used here for shooting on location with a bunch of soft boxes which is a pain!

All in all this is a masterful execution. The only thing we could recommend would be automating the manual rotation with one of professional robotic 360 photography turntables as they can save a lot of time even with the nice assembly that Almont had in this setup.