Week 4: A Magical Tokyo by Takashi Kitajima

Tuesday, August 12, 2014 Ching Lea Yee 0 Comments

In this amazing series, Tokyo-based photographer Takashi Kitajima uses the bokeh technique to blur the details of buildings and bridges of Tokyo to obtain beautiful abstract landscapes. The photographer transforms simple urban sceneries in magical shiny worlds of color and light.

One of my ideas for Exercise 2 "Light as Subject" was to use the bokeh technique to capture the night scapes of Singapore, probably around the Central Business District (CBD) area. Bokeh is not a quantitative concept. Unlike lens aperture or shutter speed, bokeh has no associated system of measurement. What matters is the quality of the blur, not the amount.

Bokeh comes from the Japanese word boke (ボケ), which means "blur" or "haze", or boke-aji, the "blur quality." Bokeh is pronounced BOH-Kə or BOH-kay.  As it relates to photography, bokeh refers to the aesthetic quality of a photograph’s out of focus areas, including the specular highlights that most easily reveal a lens’ aperture shape. It does not refer to the blur caused by subject or camera movement. Bokeh is often used in photographing a grouping of holiday lights or other highly reflective objects. When purposely photographed out-of-focus, these normally harsh or bright objects become soft, pastel, diffused orbs of glowing light. Just like these examples in this series by Takashi Kitajima.