What’s in your box of handy photography studio supplies?  Here are the tools I rely on for virtually every photo shoot.

Color Chart (I use an X-Rite color checker)

Color correction is really important when you’re using a 360º view to sell a product online.  Get it right, and it can significantly reduce customer returns.  Using a color chart is a great because it lets you have a set a baseline of where the true whites, greys, and black are.  In future posts, I’ll tell you my technique on how to do this in Photoshop.

   

Level with bubble

You want every 360º view photo to be nice and level, So I use a bubble level to ensure that the camera and automated 360º turntable are perfectly flat and level.

   

Extra memory cards and batteries

When you shoot a bunch of products, you’ll likely go through a battery or two.  If and if you forget to delete old photos from your camera’s memory card, then you might you might need to switch to a new one halfway through a shoot.  To be safe, I have four 8GB memory cards on hand and four fully-charged batteries.

Lens cleaning kit

Alway keep it clean.  Your lens, photos and paying customers will thank you.

   

Lint roller

This is actually really important.  Why?  Because when you shoot a 360 view, you might capture up to 20 or more photos of that product.  If it has a few pieces of dust or lint, then you’ll have to manually remove it from every single photo in photoshop.  Trust me, it’s not fun.

   

Air puffer

My list of photography studio supplies wouldn’t be complete without this handy cleaning tool. I use this both to clean my camera sensor and also to blow dust off the a product I’m about to shoot.  Again, a clean product makes for an awesome 360º view!

A fan

This is to cool down my iMac computer.  It gets real hot when I run Photoshop ActionScripts on it, so I use a fan to play it safe and keep it cool.

   

A room with white walls and natural sunlight

Okay, this isn’t something you can fit inside a toolbox, but it’s still really helpful.  Aside from getting out of the cold garage, this has a more functional purpose.  A room with white walls and natural sunlight gives you good, accurate light to view your product with.  And that gives you a good reference to accurately fine-tune the colors in Photoshop.

Done!

That’s it.  Hopefully I’ve helped you get a good idea of what kind of goodies you can use to help you make awesome 360º product photos.  From here on out, I’m going to start covering photography and photoshop techniques in fine detail.  So get ready, it’s coming soon!

Feel free to post any of your photo kit essentials below!