Late at night, a lone police officer on a horse crossing an intersection on Delancey; the horse did not want to cooperate and stopped often, whinnying each time. The noise of the horse’s hooves on the street were loud and sharp.
A man masked with a bandana tuning a cello in the entrance to a subway.
10.16.25
I have thought about what I call bare-sensor photography for a while, but it wasn’t until last year that I decided to try to make something from it. There were various technical and conceptual hurdles to overcome: for instance, when you remove the lens, all sorts of things can get onto and into the sensor, none of which are kind to the delicate parts inside. Further, if you point a sensor at the world without anything in the way, the results are unimpressive, mostly dull gradients with no structure. There is no subject, and nothing interesting to look at.
I tried for a while to reproduce the way light looks reflected through water or glass; I love the way it seems to stretch out and form webs and other shapes. But I was never able to produce small enough shapes to fit them on the sensor, and there was still the problem of handling things like water and glass close to an open camera.
My first breakthrough was in the Blueforms series. I used a lens, but when I manipulated the raw files in Lightroom, patterns and shapes started to appear. Some of the shapes are just noise, but others are hidden variations in light, so dim that they aren’t visible in the original image. I didn’t bring this idea back to bare-sensor photography for some time, but even when I did, the results were too similar to the Blueforms, with fields of shapes and patterns but no single subjects.
After becoming more comfortable with putting objects close to the sensor, I used pieces of cardboard and eventually my hands to block parts of the incoming light. After trial and error, I was able to make two small openings between my fingers while pointing the sensor directly at a light, and the result became Lightforms #1.
Many experiments followed. There is a very narrow range of light that can be used; I started relying on the histograms to target it. The light spot can’t be too large, or too small, and the ISO must stay low to keep sensor noise low. It is also surprisingly difficult to form shapes with just one hand and no other objects, but that was the method I decided on. I wanted be able to feel myself shaping the light—impossible, but I wanted it anyway.
Different processing methods yield radically different outcomes. Aurorals rely on wider gaps but steeper angles, with narrow bands of light raking across the sensor sideways. Etherealites are tiny spots of light that are almost entirely invisible before processing, but when boosted and colored, become strange, floating organic forms. Lightforms are somewhere in between, with hard forms immersed in fields of color.
I am sure I will find new methods as I continue to experiment, but I am pleasantly surprised by the ones I’ve already found.
10.11.25
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