The official photo blog of J. David Buerk Photography.
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!
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!
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.
On January 26th, 2023, Kaiser Permanente announced its is intensifying its efforts to combat the escalating issue of gun violence in America with a $25 million investment in its Center for Gun Violence Research and Education. In response to firearms recently surpassing motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of injury and death among young Americans, Kaiser Permanente aims to address this public health crisis through care innovation, research, education, and partnerships. The organization will collaborate with the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention (HAVI) to focus on hospital-based violence intervention programs and community collaborations. The five-year commitment will fund prevention research, education initiatives, and community projects to mitigate the devastating mental and physical health impacts of gun violence, with a particular emphasis on addressing underlying risk factors and promoting racial equity.
The expansive greenery and waterfront at Gravelly Point in Arlington, Virginia, provides a picturesque backdrop for portrait photography with its stunning views of the iconic Washington, D.C., skyline. The proximity to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport adds a unique and dynamic element to the shots, capturing the energy and movement of planes taking off and landing against the cityscape.
Take a moment to enjoy some recent family portraits I captured this past fall for this family’s Christmas cards, and a small set of senior portraits for their graduating avgeek soon heading off to college.
