360 Product View Example: Pen

Shooting a 360 Product View of this Cross pen required a bit of “MacGyver-ism.”  In order to shoot the pen, we created a custom turntable-tip for holding the pen upside down by the pen’s tip, as shown in the figure.  The custom tip consisted of a large tube fit over the turntable’s stem and over a screw that worked as an adapter between the two different diameters.  A thinner tube was fit over the screw and the pen’s tip.  On the opposite end of the pen we placed a magnet to keep the far end of the pen steady and to minimize wobble (the far end of the pen had ferrous parts in it, which interacted with the magnet).  To enhance the edges of the pen, especially around the metallic parts, we placed black Styrofoam boards on both sides of the pen.

Once the setup was complete, shooting in 360 was straight forward.  We set the camera with a large aperture (f/3.2) to minimize light diffraction, an ISO of 100 to minimize sensor noise, a fixed white balance of daylight to keep color accuracy between frames and we adjusted the shutter speed (1/60) to achieve the color accuracy we desired. From capture to final product, the total process time was about 7 minutes (about 3 minutes to capture 72 frames (this is an automated process) then batch editing, processing, output and 360 Product View Creation taking another ~2 minutes.

In the included Shutter Stream 360 Product Photography Software, we applied some editing in a batch process (edit one image then click apply to all). Edits included:

Lasso: Using the polygon lasso tool we roughly carved out the part of the image that contained the pen.