I’ve been working on my photography quite a bit this year and feel like my images have progressed dramatically from what I’ve learned. I’m finding I enjoy doing portraits and have done a few shoots recently for friends and family. I hope you enjoy them.

They are an example of what can be achieved with only Open Source software. To achieve the same results using proprietary solutions would require spending well more than $1000 on software alone. Instead these and more are available in the standard Fedora repositories. All I had to do was click on “System -> Administration -> Add/Remove Software” and look through the “Graphics” packages. It couldn’t be any easier!

I use digiKam to manage my photos and to do basic post processing. UFRaw is my tool of choice for developing the RAW files directly from my camera, and GIMP more than handles my advanced processing needs. Generating ICC profiles for both my monitor and camera using GNOME Color Manager has really improved the quality of my final images. The difference is subtle but critical for getting a quality product.

Thanks again to all the communities maintaining and continually improving these tools. I’m continually excited by your work!

judy-black-35-bw
© Russell Harrison

barb-black-18-bw
© Russell Harrison

Heather
©Russell Harrison

rebecca-05
© Russell Harrison

matt-heather_m-15
© Russell Harrison

A friend of mine recently took a trip to Dubai where he apparently ran across this gigantic Christmas tree in the mall.  He took a series of pictures I assume to show off both its grand size and its mad fiber optic color changing skills.

The set just screamed to me that it needed to be stitched together as a panorama, both do see the whole thing at once and just to see what Hugin would do with the color changes.  I assume the entire tree changes colors at once so the different levels just show the passage of time between the frames.

Its not up to my normal standards for panoramas but considering there’s no way he had this sort of thing in mind when he took the originals I think it turned out pretty well.  Especially for only a few minutes of work.

First geek to identify where they’ve seen this picture before wins! © Russell Harrison

Update: No Google searches, its cheating.

• Flickr: FUDCon
• BarCamp wiki / FUDConRaleigh2008
• FUDCon/FUDConF9 – Fedora Project Wiki
• FUDCon – Fedora Project Wiki

I had meant to to write a post as soon as we got back from the honeymoon with the title “Change is good” to echo the post I made right before the wedding. Change is good so far but it hasn’t stopped me from being way to busy. At any rate I figured I should just work on getting some pictures up, and I’ll write up about what we did on our honeymoon later.

I’ve set up a flickr group for anyone that has pictures from our wedding or related to it to post in. Please put anything you’ve got there. I’m really excited to see it! In the mean time I’ve got a very few pics from the wedding and I’ve started posting honeymoon pictures, only days one and two so far but there are many more to come!