Experience Manhattan through recent pictures I snapped. When I photograph places, I choose shots that strike my heart. This craft is my forte since my body consists of one giant nerve attuned to text and image. Loving NYC is an understatement. The camera is king/queen.

Above, you see a gold overhang that appears to have been built in the 1950s. That wasn’t the case when I investigated using Google Images’ drag-and-drop feature. It was built in 2016, so kudos to the corporate architect. Sliced off The building is a narrow sliver on a tiny lot only four feet wide, reports the New York Times.

Since I live in Palm Springs, I’ve become somewhat of an architecture nerd because the city is known as a mid-century modern Disneyland. Human achievement thrills me. The twentieth-century architects’ skills have never been bested.

The architecture of New York City, which stands apart from the newer glass-and-steel structures, uses materials that give it a sense of solidity. The smoky glass that rises too far into the sky isn’t my thing.

Manhattan, in my mind, means windows and lots of ’em. The island is all about windows. In photography, the sun is your paint in the various rectangles covering buildings in neat little rows. Go ahead and take pictures of your downtown, focusing only on the windows. Patterns galore!

Then there are the balconies. Money comes to mind for some of us. Smackdown an extra $150,000 in the Upper East Side, and you can have one of your own. A circular one has to be more. The price is in addition to one to three million, depending upon how close you are to Midtown.

Yet, consider getting a doorman and a gym with your purchase.

Snap Some Plants in Pants

The above New York bazaar shows that creative thinking goes a long way in Manhattan. Are the people there smart, or what?

Brownstone Fire Escape

I must confess that I’ve climbed fire escapes, one exactly like this in Manhattan — and not because there was a fire. Considering all the movies that feature this construction brings to mind people jumping and good guys running from bad guys, or vice versa.

The rusted steel protruding from buildings sparks the imagination. Cropping the frame of a structure to isolate these forms shifts your focus to the sharp angles of staircases, guiding your eyes from one balcony to another.

Who’s ANITA?

Gee, I’d love to see MATTHEW lit up with yellow backlighting. The Anitas of the world should be impressed with this.

Anytime text is involved, it intrigues me, which gives you an understanding of the focus on text and image found throughout my work in writing and photography.

Let it Snow

What could be better than seeing a snowman ice skate in a city that celebrates winter with white? This is New York, the most unique and fun-filled photo-op city in the world.

Takeaway

New York is an international city. Anyone coming to the Big Apple is going to take lots of pictures.

Most photographers look for appealing aesthetics. Others are more eclectic, photographing in terms of artful juxtapositions of life.

This photographer opts for the latter. As an eccentric, his mind constantly wanders from one image possibility to another.

When shooting here, relating your personal experiences as a focus to what you shoot is a contemplative process that is automatic to many photographers.

Pick up Matthew Bamberg’s bestselling literary fiction, Coconut Grove Chronicles.

All photos by Matthew Bamberg. Screenshots courtesy of Adobe.

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“There can be no art without composition or design, and careful study of the old as well as the new masters will reveal an underlying abstract composition in all their work.” — Paul Outerbridge

Dadaism

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High on my list of photography retro subjects are vintage autos, that’s right, old cars. Their design topped any design seen on the streets today—out of the ordinary. The film image of a lone yellow Cadillac in a desolate Las Vegas parking lot, captured by Matthew Bamberg, perfectly embodies the solitary drama these classics possess. If you’re looking to elevate your portfolio by shooting these extraordinary parking lot gems, you need the right approach. Below, Matthew Bamberg (that would be me) discusses essential vintage car photography tips to help you capture the remarkable chrome sculptures, tailfins, and groovin’ designs of yesteryear.

Photographing these parking lot gems is best done at a car show. I attend many here in SoCal (Southern California). Palm Springs, the mid-century capital of the world, on some days, the streets are filled only with these beauties as collectors drive their cars to the McCormick auto auctions, which take place twice a year — in November and February. You’ll find me there with my Sony Alpha, snapping extraordinary retro jewels.

If you’re a car fanatic photographer like me, you’ll want to keep the following tips in mind. The first is to find a lone yellow Cadillac in an empty parking lot.

A free and more extended version about photographing cool old cars is on Medium.com

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HDR photography is the art of bringing fine tonal detail throughout an image by combining multiple exposures of the same scene, capturing a greater dynamic range between light and dark areas. It has been perceived as intended only for skilled photographers who are adept with Photoshop and/or other HDR image creation programs. The fact of the matter is, anyone who wants to make and process a set of HDR photos can do so with a couple of photos from the camera and a couple of clicks in an image processing program.

In essence, once HDR photographs are merged, they are not actually HDR. They are tone-mapped images. Tone mapping is the most important part of tweaking HDR images. It’s the process by which images are made to simulate HDR, because HDR images have tonal information that can’t be seen by today’s monitors and printers. You might think that if an HDR image can’t be seen on a monitor, then a tone-mapped image really isn’t HDR. In fact, a tone-mapped image isn’t an HDR image; it’s an image that approximates how an HDR image would look, provided you had a monitor that could handle all the tones. The difference between the two is that you can tone-map a single image (or multiple images combined) by creating overexposed and underexposed copies in Adobe Camera Raw.

No matter what is said about HDR photography and what rules you may have heard, the tone-mapped result is unpredictable when you decide what to photograph out in the field. You really don’t know what the result of post-processing is until after you’ve finished running the merged photographs through the HDR software of your choice, be it Photoshop or Photomatix. This leaves only one for-sure fact about tone-mapping – the post-processing of a photo set is a game of craps, an exciting game of expectations versus probability, and one that can be played with any subject, object, or scene.

At this point, technology offers no in-camera preview of what will happen to your photographs during post-processing. To be sure, there are cameras that merge photos in-camera, but the resulting “HDR” photograph isn’t on par with those processed in a software program.

What You’ll Need

~ If you are inexperienced, you’ll first need to learn about the camera’s aperture priority settings, EV (Exposure Compensation), and AEB (Auto Exposure Bracketing) before heading out in the field to make sets of photographs.

~ A tripod is recommended to stabilize your camera. You’ll create a set of multiple photographs by setting your camera's AEB to take three images – one overexposed, one normally exposed, and one underexposed.

~ You need the ability to use a post-processing HDR program that lets you either let the program do all the tweaking with default settings or manually adjust brightness, darkness, color, and contrast within the image to get the desired results.

Budapest Bridge: HDR photo processed from a six-photo set.
Compare the difference to the other images made with a three-photo set.

What the Heck to Do with Three Images of Different Exposures

Photomatix offers several steps to preprocess your HDR photo. The photos you are merging will take on various characteristics as you preprocess them by making choices in the Preprocessing Images dialog box.

After you have loaded your photos in Photomatix, you’re taken to the Preprocessing Dialog Box, which has a set of important preprocessing options: Align Source Images, Remove Ghosts, Reduce Noise On, and Reduce Chromatic Aberrations. If you don’t make choices, they will be made for you by default. The options, if you wish to use them to tweak your photos, help make merging more effective for the photos you have uploaded.

The next dialog box that appears is the Preprocessing Options dialog box. These options usually aren’t changed much from one set of photos to another, so leaving them at default values isn’t a bad idea.

After you run the preprocessing, a rough sample of your tone-mapped image is shown. From there, you can save the 32-bit image in HDR format. This is the photo that appears with blown highlights and darkened shadows, a photo that you won’t use at this point in time, because today’s monitors can’t handle that fine-tune of an image. But you never know where technology will take us, so it’s better to save it.

Finally, you click on Tone Mapping to see an image adjusted for today’s monitor. On the left side of the window, there are numerous sliders for you to tweak your photo, and this is where you can get creative with options within the Detail Enhancer and Tone and Color Settings adjustment tools. This is also the point at which you’ll decide whether the tone-mapping results are satisfactory or if it’s time to trash the image and move on to the next set of photos. Try not to get trapped in an endless tweaking cycle for a photo set that just wasn’t shot well enough for the HDR process.

Enjoy trying your hand at HDR – an adventure in tone-mapping.

by Matthew Bamberg
All text & photos: © 2026 Matthew Bamberg. All rights reserved.

Since I began exploring mid-century motels in 2004, inspired by Rodchenko's unique perspective, I’ve witnessed a wave of photographers incorporating similar styles into their work. While I enjoyed significant success initially, recent trends in the market have shifted. I'm reevaluating my approach to engage both old and new audiences effectively.

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With a "comme ci, comme ça" (come see, come saw) attitude toward Russian culture, it’s important to recognize influential figures who have shaped the photography and art world. One significant artist is Alexander Rodchenko.

Rodchenko was a pioneering Russian photographer and artist known for revolutionizing collage in art. As a master of combining text and imagery, he incorporated industrial-age elements into his work, laying the foundation for the art movement known as Constructivism.

In many of Rodchenko’s photographs, you can find text, including the Cyrillic spelling of "Leningrad" (Ленинград), which is the historical name for the city now known as St. Petersburg. This distinctive script serves as a testament to his innovative approach and deep connection to Russian culture.

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