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 360 photography 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:

Even from these "tough" angles it still look reasonably well:

Not long ago we published a post on how to build a simple DIY turntable for 360 product photography sing a couple of rounded plywood sheets and a Lazy Susan bearing. Many of our blog readers used the guide and actually built it for their own 360 photography projects! But our DIY turntable was missing an important feature - automation. You have to rotate it manually by aligning marks on the top and the bottom of the table for each 360 degree product photo. This can still be useful when you work on a single and complex product where you need to quickly asses your lighting setup and product positioning, but when you work on a bunch of uniform items the manual rotation becomes an issue.

Here is a guest post by TINYenormous on how to go one step further and build a fully automated table using off-the-shelf microcontroller board, stepper motor, and an EasyDriver stepper motor driver.

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I have wanted to build a rotary turntable for quite a while. With it I can shoot 360 degree product photos, I can set the camera up on it and shoot panoramas. I can use it with my timelapse setup to put motion into a long shot. I also have an idea about trying to use it to build a masterlock picker!

There is a stepper motor connected to a sparkfun easydriver via an arduino (not shown) The motor has something like 1.5 degrees per step and it is geared down heavily via the rubber belt, so it is very precise.

I used a table saw to cut this notch. Not something that I would recommend for the faint of heart.

Here is the easy driver on the breadboard.

This shot shows the bottom of the board. I used a “lazy susan” bearing from Home Depot to keep the turntable rolling smoothly. One thing I did wrong is that it was mounted several times while I was sanding or grinding and I definitely got a bit of grit in the bearings.

Here is a new thing I have been doing to make adjustable feet. It is a furniture nut pressed into the wood with a 1/4 x 20 bolt and wingnut poking out. It is cheap, adjustable, and keeps me from having to do any more woodworking.

With the easy driver the arduino code couldn’t be easier. I think I based it off of the “blink” example code. You need to enable two pins to set the stepping mode, a pin for direction, and a pin for step. It is that easy. I also have it connected to a converted pc power supply to give the motors 12v. I’m not sure how much I’ll use this, but it has been in my head for forever, so it’s good to let it out!

Please check out TINYenormous Blog to read about his other cool ideas and DIY projects that utilize microcontroller, programming, cameras, lasers, and all things technology!

Have you already captured 360 degree images of your products? To publish them on your website use our interactive 360 Degree Product Viewer. Windows and Mac software is also included to make creation of your 360 product views as simple as possible.

If you plan to work on 360 degree spins often and rather prefer to use a specialized commercial 360 product photography turntable with robotic control, check out our new 360 photography equipment store where we offer a variety of sturdy turntables built to simplify the process and save time.

Unlike regular still photography, 360 product photography requires extra consideration when it comes to picking a tripod and a tripod head. Yes, it has to be sturdy enough to support your camera and the lens, but there's a bit more to that when you photograph products rotating in 360 degrees. Let's start with a tripod.. 

An important thing about the tripod is that you don't have to move it much in the studio. Quite opposite, it's essential for the tripod to stay fixed precisely in the same spot while you are shooting a batch of products. Precisions is a key here as even a slight touch can alter you camera alignment with the center of the turntable pretty much ruining your photography and wasting a lot of time. So if your tripod is heavy and can sit firmly on the floor - it's a good thing with 360 product photography!

Another point to consider is how easy it is to change tripod's height without tilting the camera as often you would need to adjust the height of your camera to accommodate for products of different dimensions. Camera should be carefully aligned with the turntable to ensure that both are sitting on two parallel planes such that products don't wobble up and down on final images. So tilting the camera during height adjustment will require realigning it with the table which is also a pretty time consuming operation.

The problem here is that most tripods on the market have telescoping legs that have just 2 or 3 fixed positions. Only these fixed positions can be used reliably to change the height of your tripod without altering camera's tilt. Your best bet here is having more telescopic leg sections in your tripod and have a taller center column (the one that you can slide up and down without adjusting the legs).

There are couple of quirks with the tripod head also. For one thing you don't need a ball head as there are only two types of head movement when aligning camera for 360 product photography - camera panning and tilting (tilting towards a product). That's why a 2-way pan / tilt head is the best. Secondly the panning handle should be as short as possible to allow for quick access to camera controls without risking to shift the camera which is quite possible when you use those hybrid photo/video tripod heads with longer panning handles.

Happy 360 Product Photography!

Here's an interesting 360 product view that we just finished among other 360 product photos for USA ePay here in Los Angeles. Even though it looks pretty simple and straightforward, there were couple of issues that had to be considered:

• The phone is very reflective on the front and the back - we don't want to show our 360 product photography studio surroundings reflected on its surfaces.
• iPhone would look better on a black background as it has this bright chrome-like enclosure on the sides but since we had to show it with the scanner, the black background wouldn't be a good option.
• Our client wanted to show their iPhone app running - this is not something unusual, though this post-production step takes plenty of time.
• The view is made of two parts - the phone itself and the black credit card scanner that light up differently on different angles and so exposure and the lights had to be tested carefully to show good details without blowing off the chrome enclosure or the screen while keeping the rest of the 360 product view well lit and consistent. This is relatively simple when shooting a still composition... not so much with 360 product photography. A reflector card was used pretty much on every shot to remove glare, etc.
• The main subject here is the scanner - so we want to shoot the scene almost from the bottom up to bring viewer's attention to the scanner rather than the phone. This is a bit tricky since the lower camera angles show the reflection of our 360 product photography turntable right on the front panel of the phone, so we had to raise the product up on a very narrow platform to cut out the table reflections.
• The end result is slightly dimmer overall than what we would want to see on our final 360 degree product spin, but given all of the above it's a pretty solid product presentation nevertheless.

June 8th, 12 - this sample has been removed as part of our new website deployment. You can find our latest samples here

PS: this is not the trickiest 360 product photography we have done by any means, though it definitely required some extra care and preparation.

We will be releasing our updated website pretty soon and will try to incorporate some of the most interesting samples there as well. In the meantime check out a couple of our not-so-very-recent 360 product views on our new 360 Degree Product Viewer page.