Tokyo night lights and lots of bokeh: Takashi Kitajima's cityscapes

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

This ongoing series of night landscapes is by Japanese photographer Takashi Kitajima. He experiments with the sharpness of photographs, creating abstract cityscapes in which the details of Tokyo's buildings and bridges disappear into a sea of bright multicolored highlights.

Usually Kitayama takes pictures while standing on observation decks of high-rise buildings, viaducts and bridges of his native metropolis. By photographing the city from a bird's eye view, Kitayama achieves the necessary perspective and lighting so that a single object remains in focus in his compositions, and the entire environment appears blurred, that is, a pronounced bokeh effect is created.

Boke is a young term, it is considered a neologism even in English. The word, which appeared in Russian in the late 1990s, is translated from Japanese as "blur", "indistinctness" and describes the subjective artistic merit of a part of an image that is out of focus in a photograph.

In fact, bokeh is always present in images and depends on the parameters of the camera's optics, but often the background is blurred by the photographer on purpose, in order to visually highlight the main subject of the photograph. The bokeh takes the shape of a diaphragm opening, most often a polyhedron, due to the shape of its petals, but when the opening is maximally open, the bokeh will have a round shape. By modifying it with a piece of cardboard placed in front of the lens, you can achieve artistic blurring of the background, such as hearts or stars.

In Kitayama's photographs, shimmering points of light merge into streams of color that lead straight to a single focal point: a distant skyscraper, a shop window, or a suspension bridge span. With simple manipulations of the optical bokeh effect, he transforms prosaic urban scenes into a magical, radiant world of light and color.

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