but I was wondering if somebody had already designed/built a home brew or a less
"gold plated" version of this. I kinda hate re-inventing the wheel when I don't
have to....
Its the boom to make the camera travel through an arc over the object
that gets interesting - you're right, its probably home depot time, but I was
hoping that somebody had already come up with a working solution, or had
a rig they didn't want 5000 euros for (like the virtuall.cz unit in the link I
posted earlier).
p.1 #5 · ghetto boom arm for 360 product photography???
I listed flash for sale and needed to take some pics of it, so you're post got me wanting to try the lazy susan method ->
The stand moves way too much, but it was quick and fun so it's all good.
Anyway, back to the rotational method...I would possibly use an engine stand as the foundation, you can get a cheapy at Home Depot for fifty bucks. From there it's a matter of brackets, poles, and other bits. It would be ugly and probably require some assembly/dis-assembly to transport, but might get you through the project. I would only hack something together if I thought this were a 1-time project that I didn't really want to repeat, otherwise it might be worth springing for something pro or spending the time to make it nice. You definitely don't need the stepper motor and electronics which would really simplify things.
Also, your tsuba shots work well, would be cool to add the vertical axis as well, but I imagine that would be waaay too big!
p.1 #6 · ghetto boom arm for 360 product photography???
fun shot of the flash :-)
Actually the file was so big because the images are pretty large (you can
zoom in 3x)
I was thinking of starting with something like an engine stand too,
since my metal lathe is in a gazillion pieces at the moment (I tore it down to
get the ways ground and then had second thoughts) so I can't make up a
rotating head like that easily, and maybe add a
cheep rotary table to provide the angular motion, etc. - but again if somebody
had already designed/built something that works....
p.1 #8 · ghetto boom arm for 360 product photography???
Rotating the object horizontally is pretty straightforward - usually all you have to
do is use a turntable, decide where the "center" is, and line up the object A/R.
Vertically is more of an issue, due both to alignment and fixturing issues.
The pieces I'm looking at doing range from a few inches across to a couple of
feet across/tall.
After putzing with it for a while, I can see why the common solution is to use
a turntable (for horizontal rotation) and some kind of track or arm for moving the
camera to handle the vertical orientation.
Given the amount of stuff online with 360 degree views, I was kind of hoping
there was a base of knowledge about this somewhere, but I guess not :-/
As an aside, is there a better way to handle moving around inside of a
view you've zoomed in on other than using the "shift" key? This "skin" stuff is
new to me, and...
Best,
rkg
(RIchard George)
Seanzky wrote:
I was just wondering what the difference is if you just rotated the object you were photographing instead. How big is it?
p.1 #9 · ghetto boom arm for 360 product photography???
Most of the commercial hardware for 360 product photography is not cheap indeed. Ortery turntables are good and less expensive than the European versions and they do have new boom arms designed for spherical 360 product photography, although they are not yet featured on their website.
Other than that for certain projects we build stuff ourselves like this DIY turntable for 360 product photography made of lazy susan bearing and plywood disks from Ace Hardware.
For spherical photography it's a bit more involved. Once thing you can do is to assemble a rig with two Mathews C-stands and two of their steel arms. One steel arm would go between the C-stands and the other one, the boom arm, would be attached at the end of the first arm using adjustable grip at the end of that arm (see a quick demo pic of the assembly I just took with my phone). This grip can turn 360 degrees, essentially allowing you to position the second/boom arm above your turntable. Then you would attach your camera onto the end of the boom arm (which may be a bit tricky and your camera can be a bit heavy for the rig also). So you would shoot one row at one angle, then turn the first arm between the C-sands to another degree and shoot another row. This is just an idea that should work I think. We have these C-stands and the amount of flexibility is amazing...
p.1 #10 · ghetto boom arm for 360 product photography???
Mark,
Thanks for the reply. Excellent idea on the hollywood arm! A "normal"
multisegmented aluminum boom arm and pivot wouldn't take this (I had thought
abut jerry rigging one of my other boom arms for this originally). It might even
clear the lighting grip :-). I'll have to fun-tak a protractor on the end, but....
Also thanks for the tip on the Ortery arm. I emailed them about this and on a lark
searched for this product and found that they have reserved the domain
name 3dphotoarm.com, for what that's worth...
p.1 #11 · ghetto boom arm for 360 product photography???
Sure, Richard. Yes we know about Ortery's 3D PhotoArms. There're two models (PhotoArm 2000 and PhotoArm 3000) and they have different size/price. My partner had a chance to play with one of those while visiting Ortery's office last month. Though the price is in the range you listed for the Fotorobot arm...
We are an official reseller of Ortery's products and if you still decide to buy, we can give a substantial discount if purchased through us (including our 360 product viewer add-on).
p.1 #12 · ghetto boom arm for 360 product photography???
Hi again,
A spherical image requires a LOT of images, so here's a partial test I did, using
the jerry-rig suggested by Mark (warning: this is a 16 megabyte file).
Sorry about the psychedelic background - I'd need to move the rig to do
the background right, and...
Its also interesting to observe that while a 360 view is actually fairly tolerant of
misalignment, the spherical arm requires fairly precise placement/a very
rigid mechanism to capture the image set (this one isn't so great - I didn't have a laser level handy, and...).
In case anybody's interested, here's a couple of photos of the setup - due to
space issues where I'm doing this I used autopoles/superclamps instead of
C-stands, but....
p.1 #13 · ghetto boom arm for 360 product photography???
and here's another flash file generated with this rig - I had to not include a zoom
to keep the file size down (18 megabytes) - please forgive the supports/bad lighting -
it was a test and I just ordered a big lazy susan bearing off of ebay so I can
do a "bottomless" turntable (now all I have to do is figure out a detent mechanism).
p.1 #14 · ghetto boom arm for 360 product photography???
Hey guys,
In case anybody's still interested in this, I found a partially complete Kaidan rig
on fleabay. The seller didn't want to ship the base, so basically I got the
gearbox, support shaft, arms (missing a few things), and a few misc. bits (camera
mounts, etc). Since my metal lathe is in pieces at the moment, I convinced the guy
to also sell me the metal mounting block that came off the base.
Here's the (mostly) completed rig (I didn't put an arca clamp on the beastie
yet (I think i need to find a small leveling base of some kind):
p.1 #16 · ghetto boom arm for 360 product photography???
Actually, the bad part was that a day after I won the auction, a (more or less)
complete Kaidan Magellan 2000 showed up on fleabay - the guy started out at something like 1800,
but the last auction had a buy-it-now of $499 :-/
p.1 #17 · ghetto boom arm for 360 product photography???
If you are searching a 360 product photography software ( https://www.movense.com/publisher/ ), then I would like to suggest you to use Movense App which allows E-commerce and product selling websites to capture and show 360 products spins online.
