Product photography - 360 packshot

What is a 360 packshot?
Put simply, it is a photo of our product rotating through 360 degrees. Where is a 360 packshot useful?

Certainly for irregular objects, i.e. those with many distinctive features. A camera, for example, is one such object. Its front obviously differs from its back, so we need to show it from every side. But wouldn't it be better simply to take photos from four different sides? That is one solution, but a 360 packshot will definitely attract more of the customer's attention and be more precise.

What do we need?

The key item here is a turntable that can rotate through 360 degrees. Ideally, get one that is remote-controlled, although for the more patient a manual one should do the job. Such turntables are easy to find online in various price ranges. The second item, without which editing the photos would be torture, is a light tent (shadowless light box), which gives our photo a uniform background. Using a lens with a longer zoom will make it easier to focus on the product itself and capture more detail.

Setting up the camera

As we are using a light tent, we set the ISO as low as possible and gradually increase it until we get satisfactory lighting in the photo. I used ISO 200. The aperture value

should ideally be set between 4.5 and 8; this isolates the product well from the background, giving us sharp focus on the details. Remember that the aperture value is linked to the shutter speed and the camera's ISO: if your aperture value is high, not much light reaches the camera, so you will have to compensate with a slower shutter speed and a higher ISO to keep the same brightness in the photo. That leaves the last part of our exposure triangle: shutter speed. In product photography we photograph stationary objects, so we can lower this setting. This goes hand in hand with the aperture value mentioned earlier, which lets less light into the camera. Remember: the poorer your lighting, the slower your shutter speed should be.

The set-up

Once everything is ready, it is time to prepare our set-up. We place the light tent on a stable table, put the turntable inside and carefully position our product on it. It is important to place it in the centre; if we do not, the product will visibly "wobble" at later stages of creating the packshot, a bit like in the GIF below, only from a different perspective.

Once we are sure that everything is positioned correctly, we set up the camera on a tripod in front of the light tent

The next step depends on the turntable we have bought and the features available on our camera. My turntable can make a maximum of 48 steps per rotation, turning once every second, and my camera can take a set number of photos at an interval of my choice; however, the minimum interval is 2 seconds, so I had to take the series of photos manually. It all comes down to improvising and finding solutions.

Editing the photos

Once our photos are ready, it is time to edit them; depending on what you are photographing, you will need to edit them in different ways. Here are a few helpful videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=336M9VM5eiI -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pPhvcCJTnk -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI7-SI6qWsc -

Generating the 360 image

To generate the image, I used WebRotate 360, a program that makes it easy to generate and publish packshots.

After opening the program, we click the icon in the top left-hand corner and the menu shown below appears. We enter the folder name and its location and select the folder containing the photos we want to turn into a 360 image. We tick the first checkbox, which allows us to insert the images into websites built with, for example, WordPress, using the PixRiot service (https://www.webrotate360.com/services/pixriot.aspx).

After clicking Create, the program generates our 360 packshot; from here we can save it as a GIF or publish it to a browser to see how it looks in all its glory.

If you would like to learn more about product photography, you can also read the article "Product photography"