Recent Portraits
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!
Important Projects
Flickr Photos
This blog by Russell Harrison is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Russell Harrison 
I *do* enjoy your portraits a lot, they are very well done. I like a lot their big, sharp, glowing eyes.
However, if I would change anything, would make the skin softer in some of them (or just heal some imperfections) – but I think I understand your point, you are going for realism, not for glamour, like me.
Thanks nicu. I’m still working on my process for softening the skin. I haven’t quite found the balance between healing small imperfections and looking overdone that I like. My personal preference is for the realistic style but I’m going to learn more about achieving that glamor look so I can give it to clients requesting that style.
A lot of people overdo it, resulting in a fake, “plastic”, look.
OTOH, in some photos (for example “rebecca-05”) I am not happy with the skin texture, I am not sure it is due to the high ISO value (400) or full image sharpening (maybe use selective sharpening)