I think that it's a good thing that I first describe the context where my next posts will live. Well, it's a cluster of opensource projects mainly for the desktop, about photo processing:

• blueMarine is a desktop application for supporting the workflow of a digital photographer;
• jrawio is a Java Image I/O plugin for dealing with the "camera raw" file formats produced by the medium-top camera bodies from manufacturers such as Nikon, Canon, Sony, etc...
• Mistral is the image processing engine of blueMarine (which is an abstraction layer over JAI or ImageJ)

Everything started in Summer 2003 when I bought my first digital single-lens reflex camera (for the record a Nikon D100) and I was intrigued by the "camera raw" world, as it gave you the opportunity to "develop" your own photos (for people not aware of it, in a few words "camera raw" formats are the raw dump of data from the camera sensor - they require extensive processing to deliver a viewable image and in this processing there's a lot of flexibility and control from the photographer).

But as the project evolved, it turned out to be also a very good platform to experiment with cool Java technologies. It's a way to kill two birds with one stone: my professional interest in Java and my passion about photography.