360 degree product photography is a so delicate and involved topic because products come in so many shapes and sizes. Some may be very reflective, some may have dimensions that will prevent you from simply dropping them on a turntable, and some may have features that can be only highlighted when shot from a specific angle while hanging from the top and with a certain lighting setup.

The more constraints you have in your 360 product photography setup the less options you get at your disposal for creating smooth 360 product views. It's also very important to be able to quickly assess how your product appear from different angles with a given setup before you start on the actual production of 360 product images.

So before you go ahead and spend your hard earned money on a computerized equipment (which is invaluable if you do this commercially), here's a simple guide for building a DIY turntable that will likely solve some of your 360 degree product photography needs. The good news? It will only cost you a trip to a hardware store (Ace Hardware or similar), $40 and an hour of your time to get it all assembled together!

What you need:

• 2 x 23" disks of round plywood - $28
• 1 x 12" Lazy Susan Bearing - $6
• 1 sheet of white paper enough to cover the top of plywood disks

So our 360 photography turntable will be built using two disks of round plywood and a lazy susan bearing attached between the disks to provide a smooth and steady movement. The bearing is tough enough to deal with weights of up to 400-500 lbs or even 1000 lbs depending on a brand, so the weak link is the plywood. If you go with Shepherd's bearing (featured in the picture), they come with pretty good assembly instructions. The key is to find and mark the center on the plywood disks. This is pretty simple as long as the disks are perfect circles:

First, you will need to find something that has a 90 degree corner like a piece of a white paper sheet. Place the right-angle corner of the sheet at any point on the edge of the plywood disk and mark the other two points where it crosses the edges on the plywood. Then draw a straight line between the two marks and connect the marks with a straight line. Now repeat the same procedure using another point on the plywood. The intersection between the two lines is the center of the disk.

The rest of the assembly is pretty straightforward - just follow instructions on the bearing package!

Now that the major work is done, you need to decide how many frames your 360 product views will be comprised of. We usually recommend going with 20 to 40 or so 360 degree product photos as this gives a nice balance between the total size of the images / download speed and the smoothness of your 360 product spins. To get 20 product shots, our turntable should be able to rotate in 18 degree increments. The key is to mark the top plywood disk in such way that you can easily identify the increments. Our approach is to put numbered marks on the side of the disk as shown in the picture.

Since you already have found the center on the top disk, creating the 18-degree marks is pretty simple with a protractor.

The final step is to attach a piece of white paper on the top of the plywood disk where you will be placing your products and put a measuring mark on the bottom plywood base. Now put your camera on, align it with the measuring mark on the bottom and the center of the rotation, then place your product on the table and you are good to go.

If you plan to work on 360 views often and rather prefer to use a specialized 360 photography machine 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. Also download our free 360 product viewer to package your images in a few simple steps and publish it on your website with hot-spots, zoom, full-screen, and more!

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Happy 360 Product Photography!

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 of Long Narrow Objects
• 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
• 360 product photography of large objects
• Mastering 360 product photography
• 360 product photography of flashlights

We love PayPal. It gives us great flexibility, low transaction fees, truly global coverage, and many other great goodies. Though we have been struggling with the service in the last few months. Some of our customers have experienced odd issues when submitting credit card payments for our 360 product views without signing into PayPal.

Regardless of the type of credit card they used, PayPal would always come back with an error, saying "The credit card you entered cannot be used for this payment. Please enter a different credit card number". This is pretty embarrassing when you can not accept a payment from your client, especially after the frustration of going back and forth on e-mail/phone trying to resolve the issue together. The problem here is that PayPal wouldn't really specify why this can happen...

It appears that this is a pretty well known PayPal glitch. Based on the article here, there are several possible causes:

• Credit card is linked or associated with an existing PayPal account
• Credit card was previously used with a PayPal account or assigned to a closed PayPal account
• PayPal has a limit on non-member credit card usage
• Credit card or email address raised a red flag during transaction
• Leftover PayPal browser cookie on user machine

Unfortunately we couldn't really find a reliable solution and that prompted us to sign-up with a dedicated credit card processing service (2Checkout), which is now offered on our customer invoices in addition to PayPal. Yes, it has higher transaction fees, though the piece of mind it gives to our clients will definitely worth it.

It is fascinating to see how HTML 5 buzz is spreading all over the Internet. Accelerated by Apple's decision to not support Flash on iPad, the news is now everywhere. Just follow HTML 5 keyword on Twitter and there will be no shortage of folks expressing their love to the new buzz word.

It is understandable that Scribd's CEO is "ditching" three years of Flash development in favor of HTML 5, but to say across the board that HTML5/CSS3 + JavaScript is a good replacement for Flash or Silverlight is absurd. Playing video is one thing and HTML 5 with appropriate browser support can probably compete there, though when it comes to anything a bit more complex than rendering text and changing button colors, the mix of HTML, CSS and JavaScript is an unfortunate choice.

Lets face it, HTML/CSS was created to output static textual content and images. JavaScript, a Netscape by-product, was broadly adopted later to provide for the lack of interactivity via browsers' crippled and buggy DOM interfaces. Since then it seems that the greatest invention was jQuery that gave us a simplified interface for DOM manipulations and XMLHttpRequest that provided some means for asynchronous processing. Now there is canvas and the ability to draw lines and have pixel access... Not too shabby. Adobe's Flash/Flex/AS3 is light years ahead.

Here is just a few thoughts that come to mind:

• Strongly typed ActionScript language
• Truly object oriented with real classes and inheritance
• Compile time error/type checking
• Robust security model
• Exceptions
• Modular (packages, libraries, components)
• Compiles into binary packages
• Rich event architecture
• Native XML support
• Clear code/presentation separation (not talking about frame scripts here)
• World class design and development tools with profound integration
• Slew of multipurpose libraries

Silverlight is even further ahead with mature C# language, feature rich .NET platform/FCL, multi-threading, real debugger, and best development tools.

Who is to say that these RIA technologies are closed or proprietary? They are as closed as Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, etc., all of which have their own proprietary take on how to interpret HTML/CSS specifications, DOM, and the rest of the "modern" hotchpotch of open web standards.

We at WebRotate 360 are affected by Apple's decision to stop supporting Flash on their mobile devices. 360 product photography aside, all of our 360 product views and other rich media components are done in Flash. It makes perfect sense for us and a few thousands of other companies who wants superior technology for client-side web development. Yes, absolute majority of browsers out there do support Flash. More so, its adoption will be expanding rapidly thanks to the new Flash plug-in that will be coming soon to the Android devices. Still, we and our clients now have to adjust to the growing issue of compatibility.

On the bright side, our new rich media solution has been designed with the goal of addressing this and many other problems that e-commerce companies are facing today.

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 the 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.