The Nuvolari photo collection and the raw problem
20-Sep-2009 07:42 - Filed under: Miscellaneous
Tazio Nuvolari, “The Flying Mantuan”, is known as one of the greatest drivers of the past - or, as Ferdinand Porsche said, “the greatest driver of the past, the present and the future”. He is part of the history - or better, of the legend. Recently, thousands of photos shot by Nuvolari have been found - and those of his maturity years reveal photographic skillness and aesthetic sensibility. In Mantova, his home town, an exhibit has been just opened (and will last till next December) - a precious opportunity to enjoy the heritage of a legendary driver and his time. This has been possible thanks to the Fondazione Banca Agricola Mantovana, that took care of restoring and digitizing the old film shots.
Now, what would have happened if digital cameras had been invented eighty years ago? Instead of a Zeiss Contax II, Nuvolari would have probably used a N Digital - an excellent digital camera, the first to go with a full-frame sensor and the first to give digital access to Zeiss optics. But a camera whose commercial fate was doomed, as it was retired from the market soon after its introduction, just a few months before Contax entirely quit camera production. The N Digital supported a camera raw format, and - as usual - it was a proprietary, undocumented format. Today, Adobe supports it - but will it still in ten, twenty or fifty years? Almost seventy years passed before the Nuvolari photo collection was discovered, so this is a legitimate question: what if Nuvolari shot in raw format and today there was no software able to decode the files? This is the basic question (“the raw problem”) that the OpenRAW initiative posed a few years ago.
T
he only guarantee is given by open source software. dcraw supports the N Digital, assuring that future generations will always be able to decode N Digital files. And that's why jrawio will support the N Digital as soon as we grab a sample file.
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