Nighttime Tokyo Photography Colors Modern Metropolis In Pink

Brussels-based Xavier Portela is a photographer, filmmaker, and traveler who lives to capture the world through the lens of his camera. In his album Tokyo's Glow, Portela tells a vivid, visual story of his experiences walking through the streets of the megalopolis during a personal trip. Struck by all the "electricity" that surrounded him — the signs, neons, and current of the droves of people — he attempted to reproduce the eclectic atmosphere as accurately as possible, producing a series of photographs possessing a fluorescent pink glow.

Portela explained to grape that the photographs were given their unique color through adjustments of color balance and increase of the colors red, pink, and orange. By doing so, he wanted to depict a city scene that existed somewhere in between reality and manga.

When you take a photograph, only you can feel the atmosphere and temperature, the noise and the people moving around you outside the frame of your photograph. That's why most of the time, when you show a picture to your friends, you have to explain them because they just don't get it, you had an experience and that picture help your brains to remember it, but your friends don't have that memory. I wanted to transfer the emotions and atmosphere of something real into a frame without sound or motion. Changing the color temperature and pushing the pink allowed me to render those Tokyo streets at night with all those neon signs, glowing light everywhere.

　ー Xavier Portela

Striving to reproduce the "feeling you get when you arrive in Tokyo for the first time, that chaos that is somehow completely smooth and fluid," Portela says he drew inspiration from Japanese manga and anime, of which he himself is a fan. Tokyo's Glow culminated into an imaginative collection of pictures that look as if they came straight out of a manga.

Be sure to visit Xavier Portela's website, Instagram, and Facebook for even more amazing photography.