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2025

Things seen & thought

By Aurimas Adomavicius

April 19^th, 2025

Farewell to summer

Summer, 2025

We left the city and didn't come back for a month a half. Time stopped.

Some time in July

Lots of pizza, monopoly, and ice cream at Neon Moon.

June 17th, 911 Targa pickup

The second GTS in the family. Lost a manual, gained some weight and an electrically assisted propulsion system. A different ride from the NA 2015 version, tamer and more comfortable. I'm still sad the manuals are only available in GT cars (impossible to get an allocation for) and the T's.

May 15th, Mooseland

Annual spring ride in Wisconsin. There were bicycles involved, but you don't need to see a bunch of men in spandex. A few pictures from activities outside of cycling.

May 14th, loop in b&w

I've been watching too many Phil Penman interviews. A morning walk through the loop and some black and white moments on the Leica Q3 43mm.

May 11th

Working on a mother's day card on a Sunday morning.

April 28th

There are a few brutalist buildings around the city, but even non-brutalist architecture often has very utilitarian design for the first floors around alleys, low traffic streets, and commercial/industrial centers. People lit against these slabs of rocks always draw my attention, especially with a nice morning sidelight off the lake.

The bokeh and focus falloff on the Q4 43mm is lovely. Both shot wide open at F2... I'm starting to understand the hotness behind these APO lenses.

April 27, Sunday walk

The Q3 43mm came in a few days ago, still gathering my thoughts on what Leica has improved and what compromises have been made. This flimsy plastic door on the body of the camera is odd, couldn't the USBC be next to the memory card or the battery? I'll make a separate post once I've put it through its paces and nick some of the paint off the body (you should see my battle hardened Q2, that thing looks like a gardening tool).

April 24

Day at the office, had the Q2 with me. I have so many hand-gesture photos from our history of building a business together. I like the "choke" one, very Martin. Other famous ones are the pistol hand pointer, the chop, the pinch, and many more.

April 18

I decided to create a single story here on exposure that can house random musings and images of the year that don't fall into a particular category or adventure. Came back from New Zealand yesterday, went for a walk so I wouldn't fall asleep too early in the evening (not that it helps).

Using the Sony A7RV + Voigtländer 50mm f/1.2 Nokton in all of these. Soft wide open, but gets clinical stopped down. For an f/1.2 it is small, however the metal construction and big piece of glass make it feel like it's housing depleted uranium.

I may have gotten carried away with the slow shutter speeds...

April 1

I bought the Sony 40mm F/2.5 before our New Zealand trip. Excellent tiny, light package. Took it out for a walk on the North side of Chicago. I'm pretty sure I just popped it to F11 and forgot about focusing.

Ever since Tokyo I take pictures of alleys. I was going to say "crawl random alleys", but that's for my other blog.

Just realizing now how much brown there is in these shots. That's Chicago for you in early spring.

Pretty sure that house leads to Upside Down.

March 30

We must get a discount on brown paint in this city. End me now. I watched videos on the new, highly desirable Fuji X100VI. That thing is harder to get a hold of than crack. Ok, maybe bad analogy for Chicago, but you know what I mean. Feeling nostalgic and fighting a massive case of GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) I took my old X100F for a walk. And took pictures of brown things, I guess.

March 27: musings on Fuji, retro camera design, and the future of hardware "progress"

I like the control RAW files give me in terms of color fine tuning, especially selective HSL tweaks in Aperture One. No other company, however, does film simulation as well as Fuji. My X100F is a bit dated now and I don't have all the latest and greatest film styles, but Classic Chrome always delivers.

I also like that Fuji keeps opening up the preset modification in-camera, seems like we can tweak more and more as new firmware gets pushed. The ultimate play, and I hope one of the manufacturers gets on it, would be to allow custom recipes to be uploaded into the camera. This would allow you to preview the final colors in the EVF, push/pull on the exposure to modify (e.g., think Kodak E100 overexposure), and so on. All the RAW file adjustments are standardized these days, anyway, why not allow for a reverse workflow where editing software becomes less important.

This reminds me, James Popsys had a good video on modular camera design. Modular cameras (similar to how you configure/buy a laptop) + custom recipes in-cam would be the "end all cameras" kit. Speaking of end of the world, I can't imagine anything that could be improved (or justify an upgrade) on a flagship camera like a Sony A7RV. 60 megapixel portraits allow you to see the pores of your skin pores, stabilization is so good Michael J. Fox can shoot 1/5 handheld, high ISO noise has been a ghost of the past five camera generations ago, and it all comes in a light, tiny package. Where to next, modern man?