How to create high quality photo albums

If you're new to the site and just wondering what this is all about, check out our HOWTO for general info on how to try swiveling through an album or put an album of your own online for others to see.

This page is for pointers on how to take high-quality albums of your own.

On your own, using standard photography gear

Product photography has been around a long time, and there are lots of good resources available for taking high quality product shots.

Often it's enough to use a white bed sheet or a big piece of white paper as a backdrop. Here we used a piece of poster board and a cell phone tripod, with a circular piece of paper pinned with a small screw to make a turntable:

Here's the album. (Remember to drag left and right to swivel!)

The photo quality is pretty poor in this case, but it could be a lot better with a little time and a nicer camera.

Full Service vendors

Several companies specialize in taking high quality object photographs for the web, and will come on-site or let you ship your objects to them.

For instance, we worked with 3dvo to shoot a number of products for us, and then carefully remove the background and retouch the photos to make them look great. 3dvo also has their own proprietary flash viewer with a lot of neat features and viewing modes:

(alpha quality) Turntable Cabinet plans and code

If you find yourself wanting to take a lot of photos of objects on turntables, you might be interested in the "object-scanner" source code that's also included in our downloadable archive.

We used that code to make a turntable automatically move, and then tell a USB-attached camera to take a photo. We built a cabinet to hold the camera, turntable and some big soft boxes, and ended up with what we called a "high volume object scanner". It let us shoot photos all around an object with a single click of the mouse.

You can download the sketchup model for the cabinet at 3D warehouse, or find it in the source archive.

The turntable code and design are very experimental, so don't expect it to be easy to build one of your own.