Looking for an easy way to show potential customers your wares? What about your recently opened bistro with a chic interior? Growing your business is just as much about optics as it is about the quality of your product, so it’s important to sell yourself visually with high quality photography and video. This is where RICOH THETA 360° cameras make their grand entrance as a transformative tool for your endeavors. You may be wondering how exactly THETA serves the interests of restaurant and retail business owners – so let’s talk about it.

The first step in understanding the business benefits of THETA cameras is knowing how to shoot interiors in 360°. The ability to review your entire space is invaluable as it allows you to make the most of your square footage, whether its determining the best location for promotional merchandise or visualising the right arrangement and grouping of dining tables. From a customer’s viewpoint, 360° imagery can also serve as an incentive to visit the business if the interior is compelling (or because the owners are cool enough to use 360° photography). If that’s convincing enough, the next step is actually capturing the high quality content you need, and it’s a fairly simple process. The easiest way to shoot the ideal 360° photography of your business’ interior is through the “Time Shift shooting” function – available on THETA V, Z1, and SC2 for Business models. With this method, you can shoot your empty storefront without the cameraman visible in the shot. Of course, for promotional purposes, we’d advise shooting during business hours to showcase the liveliness of your customer base, too. For even further specialization, one can order the aforementioned THETA SC2 For Business – a camera model tailored to business use cases and loaded with a “Room” preset, which is an HDR mode that corrects lighting issues between bright exteriors with dark interiors – creating optimal indoor photography.

If you’re looking to use 360° footage for public promotion on your website or social media channels, it’s important to know the avenues available to you. At the moment, we recommend using our service RICOH 360 or posting on Facebook, as other social networks don’t support raw 360° images. In the instance that you’d like to post on Instagram, Twitter, or other sites, you’ll need to edit your photography and save it as a common file type such as JPEG or PNG.

▼Try moving the image around in any direction!▼

When considering retail in particular, promoting your business’ merchandise in 360 degrees is a potential boon for online attention from potential customers. Product photoshoots or showcases are made doubly intriguing when shot in 360 degrees, and adds new possibilities for the location and styling of your shoot. You can check out this page for further details on the use cases of THETA cameras in retail stores.

On the culinary front, appearances are everything – from the table settings to the restaurant decor, and especially the plating and presentation of your food. One unique and enticing way to present your menu items for curious customers online is to embed 360° photography of each dish for users to truly explore each one before making their decisions. In an age of paperless dining, this could put your brand ahead of the rest in terms of innovation and creativity. This guide goes further in-depth on restaurants and THETA cameras, check it out for more details.

Business owners – big and small – should give RICOH THETA cameras a shot at transforming their interior design and digital content practices. Embark on a creative new venture and let us know how it goes. We’d love to see your business through a 360° lens!

For more details, please visit the product page.

Credit : Shawna Rodgers, mamimisawa