Here at WebRotate 360 we're against any form of recreational hunting.

This last project seemed typical - the shop needed a few 360 product photos of jackets, trousers, hats and some gadgets for their online store. Until I realized they also wanted to photograph a set of hunting rifles...

At first, I didn't know how to go about the setup and had to visit the store and see the guns up close. This was good enough to decide on the final approach: spin and shoot the rifles in an upright position so that they would spin around the barrel axis. Once images were ready, they could be flipped 90 degrees clockwise and presented in a horizontal layout inside a finalized 360 product view for further web placement.

When it comes to lighting setup, I always stick to the rule to not overdo it with the number of flash units. I try to stick to the principle of the London photographer David Bailey, who once said: "There is only one f**king sun!" With the 360 spin photography, it's not always possible to use a single flash but nevertheless, my setup was pretty simple as you can see in the above image.

I was not shooting this in my studio (it was done on the spot inside the store in a protected warehouse in Poland) so there was no way to make it perfect, but I knew that WebRotate's SpotEditor would make my "post" work easier so I didn't care too much about the background not being perfectly lit and that there was an incomplete background on the sides of the rifles.

I went with 40 photos per 360 spin so it's smooth when loaded inside the viewer and here's how I processed the images in  SpotEditor:

From camera (Canon 80D, 50mm macro, f11/125, JPG)
Created a path with start and end point
Applied and locked selected path to all images
Moved "Whites" slider to the left to overexpose the white background
Unchecked magenta alert

That's it! You can see a few examples of the work I did on this project on my website here: http://fotografia-360.weebly.com/knieja.html

I hope this will help some of you who will be shooting 360 product photography of long narrow products like these rifles. All in all, I'm very pleased with the results and the client was happy too.

Keep on Photographing!

Jacek Śliwczyński / Poland
Google Trusted Photographer

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