A 4×5 Photograph made at White Night Melbourne 2014. (click on image to enlarge) Note the highlighted area of the image.
In its 2013 debut, White Night Melbourne attracted more than 300,000 people. Commencing at 7pm on Saturday 22 February 2014, Melbourne’s city streets, laneways, landmarks and cultural institutions will once again be transformed into a cultural playground from dusk-till-dawn.
With an expanded event landscape, White Night Melbourne 2014 will offer a mix of free and ticketed entertainment for families to urbanites and everyone in-between. Over 12 hours, in venues and major cultural institutions right across the city centre, visitors can participate in an urban adventure of exhibitions, street performances, fashion, lighting installations, film screenings, multimedia projections, concerts, dance and interactive events.
There was also a small exhibition of some of Melbourne Silver Mine’s members analogue works at The Westin, Melbourne of which I was privileged to have one of my images showing. It was estimated that half a million people visited the city on the night and the streets were very congested, almost impossible to move in the streets at some stages of the night.
On the night, I carted a selection of analogue cameras into the city and met up with my friends at Hamer Hall where we had been granted special access to an upper balcony, not normally open to the public, where we could make some photography during the night. Along with my Polaroid SX-70 and Polaroid SLR-680, I took a couple of 35mm cameras (Yashica FX-D SLR, Lomo LCA+ and a Horizon Perfekt panoramic camera), I also had a Holga Pinhole Wide (medium format film) and my “Big Cheese” Razzle Polaroid 110B 4×5 conversion.
Detail of a 4×5 photograph showing the amount of information contained on these negatives.
The thing about ‘Large format’ negatives is, well, they’re LARGE! This means that the amount of detail on the 4″ x 5″ negative can be considerable (provided the Photographer has actually framed and focussed the camera adequately, otherwise you will get a large amount of ‘noise’). Case in point:
One image from the night (taken at about 00:30hrs) looking over towards Federation Square, shows the crowds on Princes Bridge, blurred due to the long exposure. In the example image above I have highlighted a small area of the image in red. When enlarged (next image) you can clearly see the rubbish bins in the Tram stop are full. You just cannot extract that kind of detail from smaller format cameras!
