2026 Washington Auto Show

In 2025 we got to see Buick’s Wildcat EV, and this year brought the new concept car’s roots to the show in the form of the original 1985 futuristic testbed (and legendary Hot Wheels).

First unveiled in 1985, the Buick Wildcat concept was a sleek, forward-looking statement of where General Motors imagined American luxury performance could go: low, wide, unapologetically futuristic, and packed with then-cutting-edge digital instrumentation.  Seeing the original Wildcat on the auto show floor this year made for a striking time-warp moment, especially when viewed through the lens of last year’s Wildcat EV debut.  While the 1985 concept leaned into Bézier curves, aviation influence, and analog futurism, the modern EV reinterpretation carries that same experimental spirit forward with smooth surfaces, bold proportions, and an all-electric ethos.  Nearly four decades apart, both Wildcats serve the same purpose: less about production reality, and more about Buick staking a claim on what its version of the future looks like.

The Washington Auto Show sadly seems to shrink every year these days, and this year felt especially small, with fewer attendees due to the snowstorm still impacting the region, and large swaths of missing attendance - I remember the days when German manufacturers were on display, and luxury marquees such as Lexus, Porsche, BMW, Mercedes, Lincoln, Cadillac, and Jaguar were all highlights; this year, not even Nissan was included in the Japanese offerings - very disappointing annual downsizing.  Based on this, I was shocked Alfa Romeo and Land Rover both had small displays.
Exotics are always present in some capacity, but these are halo cars for the average attendee; I’m speaking about the missing makes attendees previously would have been able to experience the product.

After the show, a cool scene of chilly, ice covered DC:

Rubin, Madonna, & Abby - Fall Portraits for a Growing Family

It’s been a year since we’ve seen Abby, Donna, and Rubin; Abby is now two, and surprise, she’s soon to be a big sister!

At the peak of this year’s Fall colors, the three gathered at one of their favorite parks and playgrounds to bask in the sunset of 2025’s warm weather.  Abby learned she is is an expert climber, repeatedly traversing the monkey bar archway designed for kids much older than her, and took flight with Rubin tossing her skyward.

Here’s to seeing this family grow in 2026!

Joel & Danie: Engaged December 25th, 2023

This Fall, just before the leaves were being blown from their branches, Joel and Danie took in the colors along the Potomac River together to commemorate their engagement.  Although they have been engaged for just shy of two years now, like so many people in the pandemic era, establishing wedding plans is now trickier and necessitates planning further out; a lasting effect in our new post-pandemic normal — Joel and Danie will be wed this coming Spring!

While planning their engagement session, the two poked fun at each other if they would wear their respective uniforms for the shoot - both are “airport people,” like myself, and paused several times during our shoot to see which flight was overhead.  Once again, aviation has a way of bringing people together.  The afternoon wrapped up with a leaf fight - no leaf piles were on hand to jump into.

Stay tuned this Spring for Joel and Danie’s wedding, after the snow melts and the flowers begin to emerge in Arlington!

Total Lunar Eclipse: March 14th, 2025

Last year we were treated to a solar spectacle we haven’t seen since 2017, and this year, to kick off Spring, we got a great lunar show as the moon was totally eclipsed by Earth’s shadow.  The DC area lucked out, with a nearby storm system going wide, leaving the skies clear for the entire red totality.  It’s been a few years since I saw a Blood Moon eclipse, and this one looked like a cataract peering through the black curtain of night sky, or at maximum totality as though Mars had entered our orbit for the night.

I used a slightly different capture process for this photo than I typically do for astrophotography, which allowed me to capture more detail at a much higher ISO than I would normally shoot, and allow me to avoid the noise normally found natively at those ISOs.  The result is this image, which is a single exposure with the stars visible behind the moon, not a composite or blend of multiple exposures.

2025 Washington Auto Show + HDR Commentary

Today’s post comes with a giant 🤓nerd-alert🤓, as I discuss technical details in an evolving World of imaging, applied to car geekery.

Like most years at the Washington Auto Show, I spent my time at 2025’s expo exploring the show floors with a camera, using the event to casually experiment and hone skills in between exploring the latest automotive offerings.  Practicing upcoming techniques in no-pressure situations is a great risk-free way to keep skills on the cutting edge.

Last year I gathered footage to practice with my HDR video editing workflow.  This year I did the same with some proper 120fps footage, and also edited all still images from the day in HDR, as HDR still formats are upcoming and I like always staying knowledgeable and prepared.

I’ve edited several personal photosets in HDR to practice and learn how the new formats accommodating expanded range of luminance is currently able to be edited and to ensure backward compatibility with SDR displays - for video, HDR is widely available and supported, with practically all new TVs and productions available in HDR formats.  Photos, surprisingly, however, are supporting HDR after video, with the format war still raging on; the predominant image format and paired colorspace has not been determined yet.

HEIF/HEIC seems to be the best choice, closely related to the HEVC video standard most end-user and web HDR video is deployed as: its high efficiency compression and support of gain maps and modern colorspaces like P3, however end-user support is still limited so it has not flourished except for Apple’s usage encouraging support to expand.  AVIF is a similar format that is promising, but even less widely supported than HEIC.  JPEG XL is not new, but is a much modernized expansion of the original staple JPEG format.  Then there is finally standard JPEG, which can be encoded with a gain map to enable HDR on HDR-compatible devices and applications, and is backwards compatible with SDR in the existing standard, however it is the least efficient of these filetypes, and gain maps are something of a tack-on making these files not always interpreted correctly by some applications.

Possibly a larger issue is how HDR stills can currently be edited.  One can edit a RAW file in HDR using the standard color and contrast edits we all know and love, however editing software may also offer SDR compatibility proofing and grading, which I’ve found is not able to exactly match the HDR grade - this is a critical shortcoming in terms of backward compatibility, and ensuring a consistent deliverable to end-users.  Furthermore, editing HDR images in Photoshop and maintaining the correct grading and luminance mapping is spotty, with use of Generative AI tools strangely returning SDR results in Photoshop while the same generative utilities used in Lightroom directly on a RAW file returning HDR results (or a result that is at least properly mapped to the image’s luminance - I must assume it is generating an SDR image and an HDR gain map to pair).

In short, despite HDR video being widely supported, support of HDR still images is still extremely limited, and is not currently ready for widespread use: compatibility is king, and SDR still images are still the standard one should be using for anything mission-critical, ie client deliverables.

NOTE: The images in this post are NOT HDR; they are SDR-only; my hosting provider currently does not support HDR filetypes, as it converts all uploaded media to standard SDR JPEGs for web efficiency - hopefully some day in the future HDR data will not be stripped, and modern filetypes will be supported.  These images were natively tone-mapped on export for viewing in SDR as close as possible to their HDR versions.