These photos were the beginning and end result of several items melting quite drastically down from their original structure into practically nothing. The idea of melting came to me when analysing the effects that decay has on food when I did the contact sheet for Amanda Hibbert. I thought of Melting and it struck me as quite an abstract and unusual way to interpret decay, which is why I believe the idea of it was so appealing to me. Although technically the concept of melting has no relation to the transformation of decay, the whole situation of something useful and desirable becoming something useless and undesirable seemed to be relevant in both processes. For these two photos, I aligned the ice lollies in a particular arrangement in order to use their shape and colour as a way to make the beginning image as aesthetically pleasing as possible. I took close-ups of both photos, making sure that the focus on the camera was as clear and crisp as possible as I believed that even the slightest blur would taint the images and simply make them look unattractive. I also made use of very intense lighting, shone onto the subjects via a small portable lamp that applied far more direct lighting than the typical flood lamp, or light bulb could. The contrast in colours between the two photos was something I found very captivating to look at, i.e. the coordinated and individual colour scheme of the first photo, alongside the intermixed use of colour in the second photo, which I believe makes for a more fascinating photo.
For these photos, I altered the rate of change using a hairdryer to melt the subject as quickly as possible. However, this did make photographing each stage of the melting process far harder, as keeping up with the rapid rate of transformation and documenting it well was not an easy process. The contrast between the white backdrop and thick brown colouring was something I found striking, therefore I stressed this even further by editing the background on photoshop by increasing its brightness in each image. The difference in structure in each photo was also something thats very enchanting to look at, an the pool of chocolate in the second photo was an unexpected phenomenon as I was never sure that the result was going to be as drastic as that. The idea behind this photo, was that in decay, things become unusable and unwanted in a sense, and this results in feeling or heartbreak and pity, and I found this to be a heartbreaking sentiment for children all over the world, having to watch an easter egg that they are likely to love slowly deteriorate into something unattainable, which was my main thought process and inspiration behind these particular photos.
For these last set of photos, the background was altered and made a darker shade in order to coordinate itself with the colour of the ice cream. This was in fact the messiest of the three examples, and therefore the least able to control and order to make look appealing. Therefore, for the majority of these photos, the end result is quite unattractive for audiences to look at, which I suppose has its links to both the process of melting and the process of decaying. The different colour scheme makes this set of photos far less intense in comparison to the previous ones, which in turn takes the audience out of the photos and doesn't have the same effect on viewers. I also had to make do with a bulb that was slowly fading and losing power, which is why the lighting in this photo is much dimmer than the others.