360 Product Photography as a Service: Diversify your Portfolio

In the past, 360 product photography required a large up-front investment to get started – a good professional photography turntable/software started at >$2,000. This was an investment that professionals would typically shy away from until they had a signed Purchase Order from their client that guaranteed to cover their initial investment in the equipment. This presented a revolving door in which no portfolio of 360 product views was available to convince their client they were the right candidate for the job. Or even worse, the work had to be turned down because the PO was not enough to cover the investment and manually shooting 360 product photography was just too painful and time consuming of a process.

We’re here to tell you there’s a better and more affordable way to get started in 360 Product Photography. Shutter Stream 360 Product Photography Software is the latest offering from Iconasys and was developed as an effective alternative to expensive, high end, professional 360 product photography turntables. Shutter Stream 360 is the first software of its kind that integrates camera control (Canon and Nikon DSLR compatibility), composition, capture, editing, process and 360 view output features into a single offering. By integrating tools that allow users to control the entire workflow through mouse clicks, users can expect efficiencies that rival the professional turntable solution – create a web-ready 360 product view composed of 24 JPG image (one shot every 15 degrees) in < 6 minutes when using a manual 360 product photography turntable.

Now that we have established there is a much more affordable alternative to 360 product photography as a service, lets get into the details about the service offering.

Pricing

Obviously pricing is the most important consideration – is it even worth your time to offer such a service? The short answer is yes – this is a no brainer. We have done an industry analysis and price points for 360 product photography as a service range from $35 (on the extreme low end) to as much as $250 per product on the high end. Pricing is quite complex as it includes multiple variables, the most important being:

Number of Frames: The more frames, the smoother the 360 rotation. On average most professionals are offering 360 product views with 24 frames – and this we agree is a good amount of frames to produce a relatively smooth 360 (see example 24 frame 360 product view). We would suggest 24-36 frames be your ‘standard offering’ however give an option for more frames should the customer wish to pay a premium. Learn more about 360 Product Photography Turntables

Product Orientation: A big consideration when quoting for a 360 job should be based on the product line you are being sourced to shoot. Consider the first example of a shoe. This is easy to shoot as a shoe lays flat on its sole and you are not required to prop it up in any way. Now lets consider shooting a 360 of a diamond ring – this will be simple if your customer is ok with the ring laying on its side however, should they be interested in having the ring stand up vertically, this will be a lot more challenging (update: see 360 Ring Mount Kit for Iconasys Turntables). And will require some sort of adhesive or prop to aid it in its position. A third consideration should be products with handles or straps that need to be propped such as a purse. While this is an easier task, it will still require some extra effort to achieve. Also consider Iconasys Turntable 360 Product Photography Hanging Kits.

Quantity of Products: Economies of scale come into consideration here. The more products, the lower the cost for shooting each product in a 360 view.

Size/Weight of Product: Bigger and heavier products will require a larger table for shooting, with a larger expense. In addition, you will require more lighting in your studio. Iconasys offers heavy duty 360 photography turntables that can support weights upward of 500 lbs.

As you can understand pricing gets quite complex. We would suggest to offer a standard pricing on your site starting at a competitive rate ($50 – $75 / product range) and offer different tiers of pricing based on quantities of product being shot. This will include a 360 web-ready output composed of 24 frames with a white background (Shutter Stream 360 has batch editing tools that can help automate editing to pure white backgrounds) Ex.

0-10 Products    $75 per product
11-20 Products    $60 per product
21-50 products    $50 per product
50+ products      $40 per product

It is also good to include a disclaimer of some sort stating that pricing can vary based on product orientation and to inquire to get a quote.