Shooting a 360 Degree Product Step by Step Tips for making e-commerce style white background spinning product shots

On this video product photographer, Dustin from Workphlo demonstrates how to shoot and edit 360-degree product shots using a wirelessly controlled mini turntable.

Especially when it comes to e-commerce there are a lot of potential clients who might need 360-degree style “photos” of their product. Doing this manually is possible if you only doing one or two but if you want to really make a living by shooting these types of product shots you will need a system that is going to produce consistent quality shots quickly and easily and this is what Dustin was trying to accomplish.

There are all sorts of different systems that can do that (some are aimed at very large studios and can handle very large objects), however, in most cases, you will be able to make it with a much smaller and more affordable system if all you need is to shoot 360-degree product shots of small to mid-size objects (jewelry/small products, etc). For this project, Dustin uses the MIOPS Capsule360 with the turntable kit. This is a pretty simple and inexpensive setup that allows the user to automate the 360-degree shooting process.

By connecting the camera to the turntable and setting everything up via the app you can shoot, turn and of course, control the flash (via a controller on the camera set in advance for each shot). Dustin uses just a single flashlight with a softbox just above the product to provide the light in this case.

The turntable acrylic platform used here is small. The main downside of this is that you might need to fill in the areas not covered by the acrylic in post – using a larger platform would be a better option.

Another important challenge is to make sure that you product is centered, otherwise, your end result will look like it is not moving in a circle which looks very strange and unprofessional – don’t try and fix this in post – find a way to get this right in camera.

In the final part after setting the product and the lights and shooting everything, Dustin takes us into the computer for editing. The idea is to make all the changes to the first image and then apply them to all of the other images (this can easily be done in Lightroom and Camera RAW as well. One of the important tip – try to get the product and surface 100% clean, removing dirt from a moving object in post is very time-consuming.

To actually make the rotating “image” (it might be a bit closer to a video or interactive image) Dustin used arqspin which you can try for yourself in this link.

You can find many more product photography related videos on our dedicated product photography on our technique section.

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

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