San Francisco is one of the most unique and popular travel destinations in the world, filled with interesting architecture, lively street life, secluded getaways, and breathtaking views. If you plan on documenting your trip through pictures, then this is your guide to making the most of your photography in San Francisco. You'll learn where to find the most interesting views, when to shoot them, and how to recreate the images you see in these pages. All the research, location scouting, and planning have been done for you so you can spend your time in San Francisco taking stunning photographs. Equal parts photo essay and how-to, "The 50 Greatest Photo Opportunities in San Francisco" is meant to complement your traditional city guidebook and show you how to capture the memories of your trip with professional-quality images.
Matthew Bamberg was born in Miami. His mother, a writer, and father, a CPA, were New Yorkers who moved to Florida to escape the brutal Northeastern winters.
After graduating Coral Gables High School, Bamberg attended Miami Dade College and Florida State University where he studied meteorology. During this time and a few years after he finished his B.S. degree at FSU, he studied cloud structure as part of a NOAA Florida cloud seeding experiment. Part of his job was to photograph clouds from a Cessna aircraft before and after silver iodine was deposited into them.
In 1980 he moved to California to attend San Francisco State University and became a public school teacher where he won several technology awards and wrote many grants procuring dozens of Macs for the school districts in which he worked. After teaching for 14 years, Bamberg went back to school get a master's degree. He studied art and technology education.
In the late 1990s, Bamberg moved to Palm Springs and become a writer and photographer. His writing focused on interdisciplinary art and popular culture, including the mid-century modern architecture revival around the world.
As a freelance writer he took many photographs for hundreds of articles he wrote, which were published in the "Desert Sun," "Palm Springs Life" and the "Riverside Press-Enterprise." Curious by light striking his lens (direct and bold or soft and willowy) and the sounds (especially of the shutter opening and closing), he struck a relationship first with film and then, like so many, with the digital camera's sensor.
After traveling around the world as a photographer, he began printing, framing and selling his photographs in many Southern California stores. His books, "Digital Art Photography for Dummies" and three books in the "Quick and Easy Secrets" photography book series describes the process from taking the picture to printing and framing it.
For his latest book, "New Image Frontiers--Defining the Future of Photography," Bamberg interviewed top world engineers, photographers and gallery owners seeking to find answers to sensor research, new camera models (including the new mirrorless line manufactured by a number of companies), and sought an answer the proverbial question: "How does a photographer get his work into a gallery?"
Currently, he is working on two new state-of-the-art books--Beginning HDR Photography and Photography Applications to Cloud Computing.
Aside from his writing about f-stops, shutter speeds, and the fabulous job the digital camera manufacturers have done that permit photographers to take almost noiseless pictures in the dark at high ISO speeds, Matt teaches photography at UCR and writing at the the University of Phoenix.
