Cabs that I created for the obsidian competition

You got a lot done! I was hoping you’d post these, I’m sorry you didn’t get to enter. I still have several preforms and am looking forward to working on them to get more practice. Do you know what kind of obsidian is the gray with stripes? After this contest I’m thinking no photo can do obsidian justice.

I'm amazed how many I finished in a short amount of time.  Especially for as many times as I had to go back on the wheels to remove scratches.  Also a lot of flaws that I spent time trying to grind through.  This is really tough material for me to photograph.  I think a lot would benefit from what I did with my Montana Agate heart cab.  I tried and tried and could just not get a decent picture until I set it on a piece of glass.    It lets a little light to the back without  being what I would call back lit.  I took the glass outside and just held it with grass as he background and the sun lighting the front I'm going to play with these a little and see if I can capture them better.  I think it will help some but not all.  I think the stripped ones would look much better photographed like that because they are pretty transparent.  Unfortunately I don't know what type that is.  I don't know what type several of these are!  The cab with the mahogany is beautiful.  It just looks kind of blah here.  The second to the right on the bottom row has all kinds of cool stuff going on inside.  I couldn't see most of it until I started grinding.  The only reason you can see a bit of it in the pic is because I lightened it.  The oval, round and free form Star Trekky triangular thing are all really nice looking in person.

I just found some templates on Etsy that look pretty good. Fairly inexpensive and a great progression in sizes. Some nice shapes but all of them are symmetrical. Templates  I might order a set as inexpensive as they are.  I certainly don't need any more circles though!

Your Montana heart cab turned out great and the picture you got of it is really nice. Your glass base technique for photographing sounds like a good one to try. It’d be neat to see if it works on the obsidian. I tried A LOT of different methods as well, both inside and out, to get decent pics. Out of probably a hundred pics taken I only got ONE where the front view did not show my hand or phone (camera) in the mirror reflection of the cab. I ended up putting a solid black case on my phone and wearing a black glove! That helped to reduce the reflection. Lighting is another difficulty. I’ve found that fluorescent and LED lights both produce a really odd wave that is basically a narrow shadow that actually moves across the camera screen. Seriously what kind of sciencey magic is this? You have to wait and try and catch the shot in between these waves so that the cab is in the lighter area rather than in the shadow. As a result any light background like a white paper or table just doesn’t look good because you can see the dark and light waves. Setting the cab on some other object or a dark background or holding it helps this. Incandescent lights can give a nice single spot reflection but they are typically quite yellow even if you have some daylight bulbs.

jasoninsd For templates, if you have a pdf program you could take a cab shape that you like and paste it on a page and then copy/paste it incrementally larger, like 10% or whatever each time. One of the reasons I only got two obsidian cabs done last month is I made myself some templates first. I was tired of making just circles or ovals or plain free-forms based on the slab shape. I have a bunch of the Cabtopia templates favorited in Etsy. Haven’t bought any yet. I just now went looking for the John Heusler templates but he doesn’t have pictures on his website yet. Hard to know if I’d like them without pics. Like you said rockbrain a lot of these sets have too many standard shapes. I have a ton of drafting templates so I really don’t need any circles, squares, rectangles, or ovals! When I made my templates I just traced some cabs I bought years ago onto plastic and cut them out using a wood burner with a hot knife tip. It worked pretty well. I think I’ve seen other people also mention just tracing a cab as a template. The hot knife isn’t super easy to control so my shapes aren’t an exact match. I figure that’s fine, they’ll be a little unique then.

Thanks khara! That's what I basically did with "Paint".

khara , that's a possibility. It's odd how large and how small some of the sizes are though and I thought when I spent $100+ on this set I'd get more "usable" sizes.