After a quick tally up we can officially say we’ve taken more 360 product photography images last month than stills, and I’m pretty confident in saying that it’s the first time for us. I think it’s a significant milestone.

Since introducing the service 3 years ago it was admitably slower than expected in taking off.  We were one of the first product photography studios in the whole UK to introduce a 360 service (and are still one of only a handful), and the expectation was that the ‘good old’ traditional packshot would quickly become obsolete. Our 360 images were simple to embed in to a website, much more engaging for the viewer, and had the obvious advantage of showing off a clients product from every angle. But the death of the packshot didn’t happen. Alongside the constant improvement  of our 360 service we continued to improve on what our product photography service could offer  and made that more cost effective as well. Whilst stills photography is obviously an old format the images we were (and still are) producing looked slick and modern and imbued a website with a high end, commercial look. Another reason for the initial slow take up of 360 photography might be that broadband speeds were slower, even as recently as 3 years ago, and then there is the usual reluctance for clients to embrace a new technology.

More recently it seems attitudes are changing.  The data from e-commerce sites says that the implementation of 360 product photography increases sales noticeably, it improves the quality of your brand and really modernises your website too. And our clients are fully embracing it now.

There is a third way though, and rather the than the superseding of packshot product photography by 360 photography, I predict things will actually level out. I’m suggesting to our clients now that they try implementing a combination of the two simultaneously. High quality, commercial product photography alongside dynamic, unique 360 rotations is powerful way to really show things off to potential customers. Brian Carol, a client of ours who sells engine parts on line did just that. ‘We split tested and used still images for a few products and 360 images for others. On a couple of items we also used 3 or 4 still images acompanied with a 360 image. The extra cost was minimal and easily covered by extra sales we enjoyed. Recommended!’