Here’s one of our more interesting 360 product photography setups that we have long wanted to share with our friends. The task here was to photograph a set of cool Scubapro diving fins (among many other scuba items!) that presented a certain challenge due to their peculiar shape. Obviously just throwing a fin onto the turntable wouldn’t be such a good idea..

So we brainstormed this a bit and came up with this simple setup:

As you can see in the images, the main twist here is suspending the product from the top with a fishing line and having it touch the surface of the 360 turntable such that there’s just enough friction to control the product rotation.

We also had to ruin all of the fins we photographed as the only reliable / sturdy way to suspend a fin was to drill two tiny holes in the back of the fin to fix our fishing line which was then attached at the top to a metal pole that sits between the two shiny C-stands that you can see in the pictures.

The final stretch of the fishing line was also painted with a black marker so that it’s not very visible on the product images.

The rest of the lighting setup is pretty straightforward – there’re two lights just behind the product to overexpose the background and there’re two more powerful light-boxes at the front and the third one above the fin to bring the main light onto the product.

This is one of the situations where having a robotic 360 photography turntable or an Ortery Photobench studio would usually not work due to the subtle nature of the suspension that is safer and more flexible to control manually.

Here’s our newer post about another interesting suspension photography sample which actually uses a robotic turntable – click here.

You can see how we built this manual platform on our page dedicated solely to our famous DIY 360 Product Photography Turntable.

We have recently moved all posts from our old photogear360 blog here, so here's some related material you may find useful: