Autoblog

Click above to view high-res gallery of the Audi Q5 with new images

Audi released the other half of its Q5 glamour shots over the weekend. We've updated the gallery with all of the images we could get our hands on (you can switch to a "high-res" view with the button on the upper right corner - perfect for saving desktops). Audi also tossed in several shots from the Q5's world introduction at the Beijing Auto Show. We always get a kick out of the designers, engineers, and executives standing around like beaming new parents. From our perspective, the Q5 looks like a typical Audi, the designs of which are beginning to lose their visual punch after having been spread across so many models.

[Source: Audi]

NASCAR racers move fast. Camera shutters are fast enough to freeze the 200 mph action, but what do you do when you want a shot of the entire field of racers? Wide angle lenses create distortion known as convergence, and if you zoomed out enough to get the entire field, you're only utilizing a portion of your emulsion or imaging chips, resulting in a noisy, fuzzy image. Photographer Rick Graves has created a customized Hasselblad to solve this conundrum and has produced some of the most beautiful images of NASCAR we've seen.

The modified camera has been dubbed DistaCam, and uses a high-speed motor drive and a metal plate with a slit cut in it, sort of like a pinhole camera. There is math involved; the focal distance is calculated, the speed of the motor needs to be correlated to the speed of the cars on the track, and the aperture of the telephoto lens is worked out. Once the numbers are crunched, the camera is aimed at an inches-wide spot on the track and then prayers are offered to Our Lady of Blessed Acceleration in hopes that there'll be some good among the inevitable chaff. It's not often that everything happens just so and the cars come out perfect, instead of squished or stretched. Those perfect bits are stitched in Photoshop after the 66-inch long frames are scanned ten inches at a time and cleaned up. When all's said and done, the prints can be monstrous - as large as hundreds of feet long. Cool. It's like those trick aluminum floorjacks they use in the pits; a total hotrod.

[Source: Wired]

We all learn the theory of what happens inside an internal combustion engine; a mixture of fuel and air is ignited by a short electric spark. Some people describe the ensuing event as an explosion, but the ideal is a controlled burn, but it's still so fast that it could be confused for an uncontrolled explosion. An engine is a practical application of thermodynamics, when it comes right down to it. The piston moves by the pressure exerted by the burning fuel mixture, and as the piston moves down the bore, pressure reduces, and work is extracted from the fuel.

Of course, there's a lot more to it, but that's the basics. We're sure you had a little animated diagram dancing around in your head the first time you really tried to understand the common Otto cycle. My mental flash player still fires up when I'm trying to figure out different cycles like the Atkinson. Wouldn't it be great to actually see inside the cylinder during combustion events? No, we didn't videotape our lawnmower with a Colortune plug -- this technique is far fancier.

Video and technique info after the jump

[Source: Hemmings]

click on above image to view all 33 high-resolution pics in our Ultimate Wallpaper Gallery

The 2007 Detroit Auto Show was probably not the best place to test our new photo gallery feature considering the significance of the event. What if they crashed? What if readers didn't like it? What if we suck at taking pictures? Well, the system was as stable as a rock and everyone seemed to greatly enjoy the thousands of high-resolution images we pumped out from the show floor, but we'll be the first to admit that great photography skills have never been a prerequisite for blogging before. However, amidst the standard 3/4 front shots and blurry pics of sheets being pulled off of concepts, there were definitely a few gems. We've assembled a gallery of what we think are our best shots from the 2007 Detroit show, some of which you've seen and some you haven't. They're all 1,280 pixels wide, so they should be suitable for use as desktop wallpaper on some very large screens. We decided not to put a watermark of our logo on any of these because, quite frankly, we hate it when sites do that. If one of your favorite vehicles didn't make the list of best pics, you can still find pics of it by browsing our complete coverage.

That said, we've realized that we need to step up our photography game, so rest assured that we're upgrading our cameras and going over what aperture and ISO mean again. By the time we arrive in the Windy City for the 2007 Chicago Auto Show in early February, we want every pic we snap to be a gem.

Enjoy the gallery!