Suzuka Gray B7 Audi RS 4

Each of the RS 4 saloons wore different colours: Suzuka Gray, Avus Silver and Daytona Gray. Of the three TT RS coupés, there were two in Ibis White and one dressed in Audi Exclusive Aviator Gray.

Suzuka Gray B7 Audi RS 4

Daytona Gray B7 Audi RS 4

Avus Silver B7 Audi RS 4

Suzuka Gray B7 Audi RS 4

Suzuka Gray B7 Audi RS 4

Later in the morning, the three Audi TT RS coupés lined up next to each other, with the two Ibis White TT RS coupés sandwiching the Audi Exclusive Aviator Gray TT RS.

Trio of Audi TT RS coupés

Trio of Audi TT RS coupés

Trio of Audi TT RS coupés

Trio of Audi TT RS coupés

All photos taken by QLP Photography with a Leica M9 and either a Voigtländer Nokton Classic 35mm f/1.4 or a Voigtländer Color Skopar 21mm f/4. Additional photos are available in the “11 May 2013 Audi RS at PDX C&C” set on Flickr.

Rockville Audi had brought out several Audis to the event, including a 2014 Audi R8 V10 Spyder, an Audi S6 and an A8 L 3.0TDI. Their Porsche store had also brought out a Cayenne and the new Cayman.

Audi S6 and A8 L 3.0TDI

Also at “Cars, Cars & Cars” was Andrew Elliott of Audi USA and two members of HUGE, Audi’s social media agency, Zev Kanter and Ross Hollebon. I actually got to meet all three and Julie, for the first time, the night before at Audi HQ in Herndon, VA and we had gone out for some food and drinks.

Also at the event was a catered breakfast featuring bacon, bacon and more bacon. I think the smell and taste of bacon matches extremely well with the smell of petrol, revving of engines and the sights of dozens upon dozens of beautiful cars.

The photos in the slideshow below were taken by QLP Photography with a Leica M9 and a Voigtländer Nokton Classic 35mm f/1.4.

Audi S6 and R8 V10 Spyder

Audi TT RS

Audi A8 L 3.0TDI, S6 and R8 V10 Spyder

Audi S5

Fourtitude’s Samoa Orange Audi TT S and an Audi TT RS

Rockville Audi’s “Kundenbegeisterung” Audi Q5

Audi R8 V10 Spyder

Audi R8 V10 Spyder

Audi R8 V10 Spyder

Audi R8 V10 Spyder

Julie showing her love for #WantAnR8

For higher-resolution version of the above, and additional, photos from “Cars, Cars & Cars” by QLP Photography, please check out the “04 May 2013 Cars, Cars & Cars” photo set on Flickr.

I want to thank Julie McCoy and Rockville Audi for helping make this event possible and a huge success.

Last week, with the weather forecast for the weekend looking good, I coordinated with the owner of the TT RS to do the photo shoot after PDX C&C. Although the weather forecast listed a 40% chance of rain and some dark clouds came rolled by about an hour before the shoot, the threat of rain never really materialized and the photo shoot was a go.

As you’ll notice in the following photos, there have been several changes made to the exclusive Sport Classic Gray Audi S5 since the first photo shoot. Those changes include tinting the windows and wrapping some of the chrome trims on the car. The black wrap around the grille frame looks absolutely stellar when combined with Sport Classic Gray. But, there has been another significant change… the S5 has since been listed for sale at Audi Wilsonville.

All of the photos were shot with a Leica M9 in manual exposure mode, ISO set to 160 and with a Voigtländer Color Skopar 21mm f/4. Although I also brought a Voigtländer Nokton Classic 35mm f/1.4 with me, I wanted to make use of the unique properties of shooting with an ultra-wide angle lens. This did lead to some very interesting perspective distortion issues, but allowed me to get the framing that I wanted. There’s nothing like being sprawled out on the ground, awkwardly looking through the viewfinder and hitting the jackpot.

The other issue (read: user error) I ran across while processing the photos was that I accidentally shot a good number of the photos at f/4, rather than f/5.6 or 6.3 as I should have. This caused the depth of field of some of the photos to be a bit shallower than I wanted. D’oh!

All of the post-processing was done through Photoshop Lightroom and with DxO FilmPack, selecting a custom profile that helps make the grays stand out more against the asphalt and gray skies. I also had to make sure that I kept the two unique colors as true as possible, showing off their subtle, but important, differences. Both in the photos below and in person, Aviator Gray is a hint darker and has a slight touch of blue. Sport Classic Gray is a nice, pure gray that cannot be matched in its uniqueness… well, maybe with the exception of Suzuka Gray Matte Finish.

The above photo was one of those jackpot moments, in which I was laying on my back, attempting to frame the shot, shielding and focusing the lens with one hand and depressing the shutter button with the other. This shot was processed with a very unique profile in both Lightroom and in DxO FilmPack to make sure the blue sky didn’t clash with the blue-ish tint Aviator Gray has.

Yeah, I had to sneak in my Sprint Blue S5 into the photo shoot towards the end, even if it isn’t an Audi Exclusive vehicle. This is one of the photos that I had to correct the significant amount of perspective distortion created by using an ultra-wide angle lens in the way that I did.

High resolution versions of the photos can be found on my Flickr photostream and in the “20 Apr 2013 Exclusive S5 and TT RS Photo Shoot” photo set. For more information on my non-Audi related photography, check out my QLP Photography blog and Facebook page.

I want to thank John Wiegert, the owner of the Audi TT RS, Scott Mitchell and Audi Wilsonville for making this photo shoot happen.

With that said, the Audi A7 was what I needed to melt away the stress and frustration that had been festering away at me. With Audi Drive Select set to Comfort, a whole collection of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! podcasts (by the way, I’m also run the Wait Wait Stats Page website) queued up on an SD card and seat heater enabled, the miles flew by. Well, until about 1.5 miles from the Seneca exit in downtown Seattle as traffic came to a complete standstill as road crews had cordoned off a couple of the left lanes. This is where the auto stop/start system kicked in and helped save a bit of petrol. More on that in a bit.

First stop on the itinerary was to visit the Chihuly Garden and Glass in Seattle Center. The glass work is masterful and how they are installed and illuminated is fantastic. I would love to come back some day and see them at night. After that, we stopped at Macrina Bakery in SODO to pick up some crack, I mean Rosemary Flatbread with Truffle Salt, a couple of scones, a bialy, and other treats. Getting there did include a couple of detours due to construction and the MMI navigation system getting confused a couple of times. By this time, it was getting a bit warm in the Audi A7 and I made use of the ventilated seats to help cool things down a bit. At least for me, it didn’t seem to be quite as effective as other seat coolers, but it helped.

Next stop, The Museum of Flight at Boeing Field. My biggest interest with the Museum was to check out the airplanes from the WW1 and WW2 eras and the whole space flight genre. It was a treat to see one of the Concorde planes in person and squeezing through the aisle and seeing the cockpit. I took a fair amount of photos while I was there, but haven’t had the chance to process any of them yet. You may see a few pop up on my photography blog at QLP Photography in the coming week or so.

Afterwards, we headed over to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma to check out their gallery, watch a team of glassblowers work on a couple of pieces and walk through Chihuly Bridge of Glass. We ended our tour of museums with a stop at the LeMay Museum for a member appreciation meetup. Not too long after that, we were back on the road and heading back home.

The whole trip, plus the jaunt back home from Audi Wilsonville, racked up just under 390 miles on the trip computer. The digital fuel gauge showed a full tank Friday afternoon and only worked its way down to about a quarter tank. After filling the tank back up, which was just under 15 gallons, and doing some maths, I was able to net just about 26.5 MPG. Since most of the driving was on the highway with minor use of cruise control, that came close to the 28 MPG highway rating that the 2013 Audi A7 gets, according to the EPA. Keep in mind, I did have a bit of fun with Drive Select in Dynamic mode while shuttling between Wilsonville and home, as well as between Seattle and Tacoma. The auto stop/start system didn’t get too much of a work out, outside of the bit of the traffic mess that morning.

The Audi A7 did its job as a cruiser and grand tourer quite well and definitely helped me unwind. My complaints noted in the previous blog post about the A7 still stands, though I would like to add few more:

• Even though there is a fair amount of rear glass on the hatch, the aggressive rake negates any of its advantages when it comes to rearward visibility. The side mirrors taper a bit too much to compensate for the not-so-great rear view.
• The seat belt tension in Dynamic is set way too taut when driving in city traffic and/or on bumpy roads. No amount of height adjustment made it feel any better. Thankfully, that can be modified by changing the setting for Drive Select: Individual.
• Ventilated seats could do with a bit more cooling and seat heaters drop off of maximum after too short of a time.
• Unlocking the door without using the key seemed to be more finicky than on my Audi S5. There were a couple of times where reaching in to unlock the door would unlock, then lock the door, or, just re-locks the door.

Personally, I still wouldn’t go out of my way to purchase an Audi A7, even with the diesel version coming to the US later this year. I would rather go with the equally well-designed and appointed Audi A6 3.0TDI or save up a bit more and get an S6. The lack of a proper A6 Avant still nags at me, but I suppose Americans just don’t do wagons anymore. Shame.

I would like to thank Audi Wilsonville for the opportunity to drive the Audi A7 for the weekend.

Once I got home and started processing the photos that were taken, one really stood out and was just begging to be made into a wallpaper. So, I decided to make two different versions of a wallpaper that are optimized for both an iPad with Retina Display and a 15″ MacBook Pro with Retina Display. The latter can be used on computers with widescreen displays, but will either be scaled down or cropped.

To download the full-size wallpapers, right-click the image below and choose “Save Link As”. If you click on “Save Image As” or “Save Picture As”, you will only get the thumbnail version.

#LoveMyS5 Wallpaper for iPad with Retina Display

#LoveMyS5 Wallpaper for MacBook Pro with Retina Display

You can also view the other photos from the photo shoot on Flickr.

25,000 Miles

Even after all of those days and miles, I still #LoveMyS5 as much, if not a lot more, than when I first set my eyes on it. There are days that I still cannot believe I get to call that car my own. It continues to be a great daily driver and the fun of rowing through the gears hasn’t waned much (stop and go traffic sometimes tests my love for a manual gearbox). I still cannot get over the sound and smooth power delivery of the 4.2-litre V8 and the estimated average fuel economy of 16.4 MPG is what I had been expecting with a lot of city driving.

Can’t believe this photo was taken over 2.5 years ago

During that time, I had been re-contemplating getting wheel spacers to help bring out the wheels and tyres out and make them look like they are filling out the wheel wells a bit more. It may not entirely make the stance of the car any different, but at least spacers won’t compromise the car’s ride quality that lowering the car would do. I also had the task of deciding on how much I wanted the wheels to come out. After looking at a couple of other S5s, I found one a combination that is just about right for me: 10mm up front and 15mm in the rear. 20mm would have been another great choice for the rear and 25mm would have stuck out a wee bit too much.

So, I brought my S5 in this past weekend to Audi Wilsonville, who graciously stores my second set of wheels and tyres when not in use, to get the H&R spacers I ordered earlier installed along with getting my summer set back on. And boy, did that make a difference in both ride quality (hate, hate, hate, hate run-flat winter tyres) and in how my S5 now looks. Below you’ll see a photo of my S5 without spacers installed and a photo with the spacers.

As you can kind of see, the rear wheels no longer look like they are tucked almost all the way into the wheel wells. You can find several more photos of my S5 with spacers posted on the “09 Mar 2013 #LoveMyS5 with Spacers” set on my Flickr stream.

All I can say is, the way that my S5 now looks with the wheel spacers is the way all S5s should come from the factory.

I have created six variants of the logo, each based on the three common colors for Audi: black, white and red.

The files are in PNG format and can be used as badges or watermarks for your photos. I am making all six logos available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. Feel free to share, but please respect the conditions set out by the license.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs and other social media outlets are quite rife with individuals re-posting of content without attribution or providing credit where credit is due; all, without a second thought. Speaking as an individual, I’m guilty of that myself and I have been getting a lot better at doing what is right.

With that said, I think it is a whole lot worse when the same thing is done by a social media team representing a company and brand. Not only are they risking being exposed by their fans and followers, but it could also lead to the account being blocked or deleted outright; as, the copyright holder can report such posts to the site directly or via a DMCA takedown request. No company wants their social media presence to go dark, particularly right before any campaign, because of some idiots that don’t care about copyrights and attribution.

So… you might be asking, has led me to write up this post? Good question.

This morning, at about 9:34 AM Pacific Time, Cavender Audi posted a photo on to Twitter and their Facebook page with the text, “Red or blue?”. In case the tweet is taken down between the time that I write this and when it gets posted, the following is the original tweet and the photo that was attached to that tweet and Facebook post.

Cavender Audi Tweet of Cropped Image

Cropped image posted by Cavender Audi

I immediately recognized that photo as it was one that I took, along with others in a set, at Audi Wilsonville on 18 January 2013. It was one of the photos that I had provided to Scott Mitchell at Audi Wilsonville, with their logo as a watermark over. The photos were soon posted on their Facebook page and later re-shared by Audi USA on to their page. But, the photo that Cavender Audi had posted didn’t quite look right: the photo was badly cropped. For comparison, below is the original photo with my usual watermark and a version with the Audi Wilsonville logo:

Photo with original watermark

Photo with Audi Wilsonville Logo

So, in order to nix the Audi Wilsonville logo, they had to also crop out a portion of the Audi S7 in the photo. When I noticed both the tweet and the post on Facebook, I let them know where to find the original photo. A period of time went by, no response. I continued to poke and prod and let Scott Mitchell know about what they did. Still no response back.

After waiting about two hours, I decided to try to get a hold of someone at Cavender Audi, be it via the main phone number listed online or the contacts listed on their website. The call to the main number at 11:42 AM resulted in a typical message saying that the call may be monitored or recorded and over 15 rings before giving up. At around 11:45 AM, I tried calling one of the managers listed. That got me to the receptionist, who forwarded the call over to Rick Cavender’s line which went to voicemail after 4-5 rings. I decided to go to their Facebook page photos and noticed that they have downloaded and re-posted several images that I have posted, including a photo of Scott Mitchell’s exclusive Audi S5 (with the watermark) and the screenshot that I took of my iPad with the menacing Audi R8 photo. Both instances include absolutely no credit or attribution. Sadly, there were too many other examples to list them all in this post.

I decided to try again after getting a bit to eat and rang back at 12:09 PM and specifically asked for either Sam Robles or Jim Wilson, the General Sales Manager and General Manager respectively. The receptionist sent me over to Jim Wilson, who picked up promptly. I explained to Jim who I was, what was posted on to their Facebook page and Twitter stream, that they had stripped out the watermark and had not provided any credit. Jim had mentioned that they outsource their social media work to a third-party company (no names were mentioned) and asked how to proceed, including whether the photos should be taken down. I agreed to that and stated, again, that they need to make sure to provide attribution and credit in such posts moving forward. He stated that he agreed and would let them know.

The Facebook post was removed from their page at 1:06 PM, but the tweet still stands as of 5:11 PM. I still haven’t had any contact from the people who run their Twitter account or Facebook page. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

The lack of response is the antithesis of how a social media team should run an account and presence for a company or brand. No matter if the customer or fan is right or wrong, being silent makes things look worse than it ought to be. You are one with the brand and that’s how people see you. Remember, as a social media manager or associate, you have essentially been given the keys to the kingdom and the trust that goes with it. Don’t <bleep> it up.

Yesterday morning, I got to talk an owner of an Ibis White Audi R8 V10 (which he brought out) and an Audi S7. The discussion included my Leica M9, his Audis and the photos that I post up on to my Facebook Page. Over the course of the morning, a Citroën 2CV joined the meet, along with a fleet of BMW M3s. During that time, the owner of an Ibis White Audi TT RS arrived and parked next to the aforementioned Ibis White Audi R8. The owner of a very rare (1 out of 10) Sprint Blue Audi A6 allroad quattro that was brought over for the German Ski Federation to use at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah.

To make things even better, both an orange Lamborghini Gallardo (corporate cousin to the Audi R8) and a yellow Lamborghini Diablo arrived and parked near the Audi R8.

Below are some of the pictures of the various Audis and of the two Lamborghinis that made it out yesterday. Additional photos can be found on my Flickr photostream under the “09 Feb 2013 PDX C&C” set.

Ibis White Audi R8 V10

Citroën 2CV

Ibis White Audi R8 V10 and Audi TT RS

Sprint Blue Olympic Audi A6 allroad quattro

Moro Blue Audi S4

Orange Lamborghini Gallardo meets an Ibis White Audi R8 V10

Yellow Lamborghini Diablo

Gray Audi A4

Sprint Blue Audi S5