Today I will share a couple of quick tips on how we recently produced 360 product photography of a few racing helmets for a customer. To see the final result, check out the helmet examples we shared under 360 product photography services.
Lighting
I usually use continuous lights for my 360 product views, but for these helmets I used strobes. I shot stills of these helmets beforehand and had the lighting looking good, so I just progressed from that shoot.
I used 2 x 1 x 1m soft boxes either side with a strip light at the top shot through a large scrim or translucent reflector. This provides a nice even fill at the top. I did try it first without the reflector, but it created a distracting hotspot with soft box only.
The strip highlights created by the soft boxes were not perfect out of camera and needed a tidy up in Photoshop. In the setup you can see some white card on the left and right side between the soft box and the background Perspex to soften the dark lines created.
Rigging and Turntable
To edit out the stand the insert was shot separately by shooting some images with the helmet upside down and later flipping them 180 degrees and editing in.
The helmets were placed on a small floor stand with some packing foam on the top to make it more stable.
The turntable is homemade and measured out in both 24 and 36 shot increments. It's just a round piece of chip board laminated white and cut round by the supplier, I also asked them to drill a small hole in the centre for my reference.
The "lazysusan" turntable mechanism underneath came from a woodwork supply shop.
Post-production
We needed to show the visors clear the way customer provided them to us. Normally, I'll show the product clear by back-lighting but with these reflective helmets the back-lighting created a distracting reflection around the helmets, so I decided to create the translucency in the visor in post-production.
I did that in Photoshop by using the quick selection tool to select the part that needed to look translucent, duplicating the layer and using the blend mode in linear light so I could adjust the transparency to show some of the visor so it's not completely white but does look translucent.
Contact See 360 Degrees for consultation and online imagery as required.