Photo by Bruno Glätsch

Hi everyone! My name is Husna Azizadah, and I’m one of the co-founders at Twin Moons LLC, located in Hacienda Heights, California. We offer three core services at Twin Moons: 3D Virtual Tours, Google Street View Tours, and 360 product photography. And of course, we use WebRotate 360 exclusively for all of our 360 product photography!

Recently, one of our clients that we had created a virtual tour for asked if we were able to do 360 photography of their products. They manufacture commercial gate operators that weigh approximately 200 to 250 lbs...

Of course we said, "YES", but deep down inside I knew that we didn't have a turntable that could handle this! We had just started with 360 product photography at this point and only had small turntables that could handle up to about 50 lbs. Our budget was tight so there was no way we could afford one of those high-end turntables that cost in the thousands. But I was confident that our team would be able to come up with a solution, and so we started on our DIY quest!

A couple of days after meeting with this client, my husband was at another client site and noticed that they had these giant cable drums in their warehouse that they were getting rid of:

These looked like a perfect fit for the job, so he brought a couple back to the office.

After doing some searching, we found these 1,000 lb capacity lazy susan bearings. Installation took only about half an hour, and we were ready to take it for a spin:

The next challenge was the lighting setup. Our softboxes were too small to use for this product, so we had to come up with another cost-effective solution. We opted to build some large scrims with PVC and cloth shower curtains from Target (NOT the plastic ones)! The shower curtains were attached using industrial strength Velcro:

The top of the turntable was covered with large white Formica sheets that we found at Home Depot and for the backdrop, we used Savage Seamless background paper. I absolutely love this paper since it’s 12 yards long, 107 inches wide, and has just the right thickness.

We were now ready to shoot, but there was still one last step left, and that was to place incremental markers on the turntable. We opted for 5 degree increments as that would give us a lot of flexibility. For these products, we decided on taking shots at 15-degree increments for a total of 24 shots:

We photographed the product with a tethered Nikon D750 (shot at f/16, 1/6 sec, 50mm). The background was lit with Nikon SB600 and SB700 flashes sitting on the floor and pointing at the background. Here’s the setup (in early state; sorry, I couldn’t find a better picture!):

Each image required about 2-3 minutes of post-processing (about an hour total) in Photoshop to mask the product and blow out the background.

And here's the final output. Just hover with your mouse or tap to load the 360 product view, then drag the images or tap to zoom-in.

I would love to hear your feedback and address any questions. Please feel free to contact me at husna@twinmoons.com or via https://instagram.com/twinmoonsllc.