Second Shoot

So for my second shoot I wanted to take the principles of vanitas and try to apply them to present day issues. The issue I chose to look at was climate change and the environment.
For this shoot I wanted to highlight the melting ice caps and rising sea levels, so it is for this shoot that I wanted to use my frozen skulls.
I purchased an out of date world atlas for £1.50 from a charity shop and cut out a few of the maps and things to use in the shoot.
I wanted to show the ice skull melting and dripping into water with the maps showing under the water and a picture view of the earth in the black sky.
I suspended the skull using a bent wire hook and fishing wire. and used some double sided tape to stick the picture of planet earth to the black backdrop.
The difficulty I had was getting the Ice skulls to hang correctly, whilst at the same time to get it to stay still long enough to get a reasonable exposure as every time I tried to adjust anything it kept swinging.
Unfortunately I was unable to get the picture before the hole in the skull I was using to hang it melted through and it fell.. I tried various other shots but i was not very happy with the results.
Next I used the second smaller skull that I made but I had the same problems again so in the end I abandoned the idea of the frozen skulls.

(....This is the best shot from my first frozen skull. I had to really burn in the background in order to make this work. It was just after this that it fell and broke.)

(....This is the best of the images using my second frozen skull, but still not good enough...)

I did try some compositions using the ordinary skulls as well, including some experiments in using 3 skulls and the planet which were interesting, but not what I was looking for...

(...Here is one of the images using the 3 skulls that I did...)

I did get some interesting results using a cd sleeve on which I drew a crude skull with a black marker. I then held that in front of my light source to cast a skull like shadow over my cut out earth and then had a dead flower in front of it as well..

(...I did like the idea of this image, but I didn't feel that it was just quite good enough,

especially the skull shadow could have been better...)

After 4 hours I gave up and decided to start again..

In conclusion for this shoot I do think the actual idea of the ice skulls was good. In practice, it was handling the ice that proved difficult. Some of the other Ideas I came up with were also worth exploring at a later date..

I do think that one day I will come back to this but having learned some valuable lessons...