Lomos and surfing go together like… a horse and carriage? We can do better than that. Eggs and truffle oil, or naps and Sundays, or good intentions and the road to hell.

The point is, Lomo has realized this synergy and has created both a special camera and a special contest to celebrate the phenomenon.

So check those things out, and also check out these Lomo surfing pics, plucked dripping wet from a flickr pool.

photo by Rodrigo Cayo

photo by czuczy

photo by Lomokev

photo by Pedrokid

Photo by CJ Lomo Photo

photo by Microabi

get off the internet, go catch a wave!

Has anyone had the pleasure of making this camera’s acquaintance? Please tell us about it.

Mamiya RZ33 Digital Camera Kit

* Mamiya RZIID Camera Body
* Large 48 x 36mm CCD Sensor
* 33 Megapixels
* 16-Bit Color
* 12-Stop Dynamic Range
* Large ISO Range (50-800)
* 3.5″ (90mm) LCD Touch Screen
* Shutter Syncs at All Shutter Speeds
* Compatible w/Mamiya RZ Lenses & Finders
* Leaf Capture/ Capture One Included

Perhaps I should choose the 6 month payment plan, and then lose myself in the wild. Just kidding, B&H.

If you are a fan of the Friday Round Up, you are gonna looove dump.fm (WARNING: SOME NSFW CONTENT) I’ve posted links to dump.fm before but it’s high time I gave it the props it’s due by devoting a post to it. Dump.fm is the brainchild of artist/internet archeologist Ryder Ripps and developers, Scott Ostler, Tim Baker and Stefan Moore. If you like to twitter but you hate words you should try this.

Dump by Tom Moody

Dump.fm allows pictures “to be used for realtime communication and collaboration. Users can send image URLs (which display instantly in the chat), upload locally from their hard drive or post pics right from their webcam. Every image gets stored in your DUMP.FM log, similarly, a log is kept of the entire collaboration.” Think tumblr but with more potential for realtime exquisite corpse-esque collaboration between users. Take for instance evolving and perhaps familiar memes such as “Sloth Goth” and “Deal with it!” – both originating on or near dump.fm.

As soon as you log into dump.fm, you are directed to the live image chat taking place and admittedly, it can be a tad intimidating (I think I have dumped but once and I am still getting my sea legs) but this is where the magic happens. You can post links, uploads, webcam pics as single images or any combination therein to create your own montages. Just be sure to be quick ’cause the conversation moves fast and it is the most fun when you can develop on a theme or string of images. If you are having problems keeping up, just consult the calender where the founders have provided a little help with themes such as ” THIS CAT’S FACE ON STUFF” for July 4th

Dump Fodder!

Today, I decided to round-up some of my favorite Facebook “Likes” and suggest that you “Like” them too…

The Biggies: ASMP, The Center for Fine Art Photography, MoCP, ICP, MoMA, P.S.1, LACMA, Whitney Museum, The Guggenheim, Rhizome

The Books: Self-Publish, Be Happy, Hassla, Dashwood Books, Steidl, LayFlat, Printed Matter

The Magazines: Fantom Editions, Ahorn Magazine, ‘SUP Magazine, 01 Magazine, FOAM Magazine, The Journal, Daylight Magazine, Blind Spot, British Journal of Photography

The Galleries(ists): Capricious, ClampArt, Taxter & Spengman, Golden, Foley Gallery, 303 Gallery, Zach Feuer Gallery, KLOMPCHING, Daniel Cooney Fine Art, Michael Mazzeo Gallery

The Resources: Humble Arts, photolucida, Photo Festivals/Foto Festivals, collect.give, Project 5, The Exhibition Lab, Residency Unlimited, Res Artis, Print Space, iCI (Independent Curators International), Aperture Foundation

The Fashion: The Gentlewoman, Fantastic Man, Dossier Journal

The Internet: Too Much Chocolate, American Suburb X, Flak Photo, The Exposure Project, TriangleTriangle

And, lastly, some personal favorites: UbuWeb, TED, “Become a Fan”, AND i don’t think i could live without horses

Drop a line on our Facebook page with some of your favorites!

I’ve been following the recent discussions around the OVER-ness of photography with great mirth. Mostly, I can’t believe that the discussion is even talking place let alone the people discussing it. In fact, I get a little bored of myself even as I write this. Then, I remind myself that this has been a favorite pastime of photographers and theoreticians since the medium’s inception and I am soothed by the gentle repetition of phrases like “medium in crisis” and ” digital vs. analogue.” It’s long been my belief that photography is never and always “over”: never, in that, the medium, if defined etymologically as “light, writing” will never be “over” so long as light and chemical, sensor, paper, interact to form images and always, in that, defined by mechanics, photography will continually be redefined by the limits and/or potentialities of the mechanisms combined to make a photograph. Yet, mechanism is exactly where the discussion often gets waylaid and talk around the release of Photoshop CS5 is a prime example.

Take for instance, this piece by Stella Kramer regarding the horrifying addition of the Content Aware Fill. Stella, like many, sees this tool as the beginning of a slippery slope toward The End of Any Semblance of Reality where one won’t know “how anyone is going to be able to trust photography at all anymore.” The problem, poor Stella, is not how anyone is going to trust photography but why anyone “trusts” photography at all when Hippolyte Bayard, the defamed inventor of the positive printing process, showed us photography’s first fake literally within months the world’s first public exhibition of photographs on June 24th, 1839?

Hippolyte Bayard; Self Portrait as a Drowned Man, 1840

So, why do we have such high expectations when the photograph itself has been synonymous with trickery since its invention. What part of our animal brain is so opposed to the acceptance that images lie. Perhaps the problem starts in photography’s mimesis of human sight. The photographic image sends a signal to the brain that this image is akin to what one would see with one’s eyes and therefore reflective of reality. We have learned over millennia to trust our senses and most importantly our sense of sight therefore, we trust photographs. Armchair analytics aside, it is this primal expectation of truth that so often confounds our ability to think critically about photography.

Madonna; believe it or not.

Stella pleads, “What’s to stop people from removing critical information from photographs, like a person or a weapon? If you can remove things so easily from a photograph, what’s to stop people from re-creating events to suit their own purposes? Do you think the Chinese government wouldn’t want to remove the man who stood in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square?” I answer, nothing, nothing at all. Nothing ever has stopped this from happening and nothing ever will. It’s just easier now so, as image makers, educators, and consumers it is imperative for us to think a little more critically about what we are viewing. As for the Chinese government, they would do exactly what they did do which was eliminate the offending image from google searches (until recently, of course).

Google Search before and after Google circumvented China’s censorship (click above for larger image)

Point being, so long as there are ways to manipulate an image or the dissemination of an image, they will be employed for good or evil or beauty or whatever the whim of the person in control of the manipulation. That said, I suggest we all head over to createLive (seriously, go deeper, there are FREE classes on just about everything on this site) and learn how to use these fascinating new tools. Then revisit good ol’ Benjamin, Barthes and Sontag for a refresher on why one must never believe a photograph in the first place.

Ok, I know I  bored you all with NASA images already this week, but this is too awesome not to share. Now I will hold my NASA peace.

When Ajay Ramesh and Prithvi Aiyaswamy, two seventh graders from Chaboya Middle School, San Jose, Calif., visited the Fluid Mechanics Laboratory at NASA Ames Research Center they found that the principles of fluid mechanics are not such a ‘drag’ after all. The two youngsters both showed up for their experiment with a half dozen toy cars they found at home. “Our project is to find the best design shape that has the least amount of drag,” said Aiyaswamy. “As we began the experiment, we realized that cars with a sloping shape perform better.”

The boys were fortunate to request their visit when the Fluid Mechanics Laboratory was uniquely set up to accommodate their request. Kurtis Long, test engineer at the Fluid Mechanics Lab received permission for the boys to visit and donated his lunch hour to help the boys perform their test.

The boys placed the cars in a pool of water. Dye was added to the water and photos were taken of the dye flowing around the toy cars. “Air and water have the same flow characteristics, but by using water we can slow down time and see the flow more clearly,” explained Long. With these photos, the boys could measure the drag of each car. The orange liquid behind the car illustrates the wake, which can be used to determine the car’s drag. The green lines across illustrate air moving across the car.

Image Credit: NASA/Eric James

Ah, there’s nothing I enjoy more on a Wednesday morning with my coffee than a high-resolution satellite image from space. Make it an interesting image of a body of water, and I’m in heaven.

Thank you Wired, for hooking me up. I will now pass the beauty on to you, TPP reader. You’re welcome.

Ganges River, India

The false color image of the Ganges River Delta was taken in 2000 by the Landsat 7 satellite. Bare, sandy soil appears white in the image, and the swamp forests of the region, home to the Royal Bengal Tiger, show up as green. The 1,560-mile-long river originates in the Himalayas and flows across the Uttarakhand state of India to the Bay of Bengal.

Irrawaddy River, Myanmar

The Irrawaddy River splinters into several outlets in its delta on the Bay of Bengal, creating the ideal environment for mangroves. However, a lot of the mangroves have been cleared for rice cultivation, leaving the coastline without the natural protection of these partially submerged forests. Since this image was captured by the Landsat 7 satellite in 2000, even more mangroves have disappeared and in 2008, Cyclone Nargis brought a 12-foot storm surge that devastated the area, threatening the country’s food supply.

Niagara Falls

Though a satellite’s view of a vertical feature on Earth may not be the most flattering angle, this image of Niagara Falls is impressive. The Niagara River drops nearly 170 feet to form one of the world’s largest waterfall, shown above in an image taken by GeoEye’s Ikonos satellite in August 2004. More than 1.7 million gallons of water runs over the edge every second, constantly eating away at the rock below and pushing it back as much as 20 feet in a year.

The Nile River, Egypt

The Nile River carves a fertile scar through this arid part of Egypt, providing a lifeline in an otherwise barren region. The agriculture that lines the river fills the floodplain on the floor of the river valley, which averages about 6 miles across in the image above. The boundary between the green and beige marks the valley walls.

San Juan River, Colorado

The San Juan River runs 400 miles from Colorado through New Mexico and into Utah where it flows into the Colorado River. This image is of Utah’s Gooseneck State Park, named for the crazy switchbacks the river takes here. In certain places, it has packed 5 miles of river into a 1 mile stretch of land. This part of the San Juan is a popular river rafting destination. Another stretch in New Mexico is famous among fly fishers.

Lena River, Siberia

The Lena River is the world’s 10th longest, stretching 2,800 miles and draining almost a million square miles of Siberia. The Lena’s delta, shown here in a false-color image taken by the Landsat 7 satellite in 2000, covers more than 11,000 square miles on the Laptev Sea. The delta is frozen tundra for around seven months of the year. For a few months it is wetlands and is protected as a wildlife reserve.

The Mississippi River

Over the past 10,000 years, the Mississippi River has wandered along 200 miles of coastline, switching to a new outlet into the Gulf of Mexico every thousand years or so. Left alone, it would continue to move. Holding it in place is one of the Army Corps of Engineers’ most impressive feats. The Mississippi is the biggest river in the United States, stretching 2,320 miles.

Colorado and Green Rivers, Utah

The Green River (on the left) meets the Colorado River in the middle of Canyonlands National Park, Utah, in this image from GeoEye. Cataract Canyon begins just below the confluence, and contains a very popular stretch of water for river rafters, dotted with rapids.

The circular structure in the upper left corner of the image is Upheaval Dome, named because geologists suspected it was formed when layers of earth were pushed up by a buoyant pocket of salt, known as a salt diapir. Since then, however, geologists have determined it was caused by an asteroid impact.

See more at Wired.

All images: USGS/NASA

I was recently so excited about Alexx Henry’s moving cover for Outside Magazine. The thrill is just now wearing off and Bam! He does something else awesome. This new project is for the ipad, naturally,  shot with RED’s Prototype Epic MX Sensor.

Here’s what it is:

Together with co-directors Cory Strassburger and Ming Hsiung, we produced a motion magazine cover and feature spread for Viv Mag – an all digital magazine, which would allow us to create content that will be able to live on the iPad and other tablet devices where digital magazines can live.

VIV Mag Interactive Feature Spread – iPad Demo

Behind-the-scenes!

VIV Mag Featurette: A Digital Magazine Motion Cover and Feature for the iPad

See more of the future, here.

Sony has a new camera that dispenses of scary words like “aperture” and “f-stop”, settling instead on comfortable, obvious terms like “background defocus”.

Below is a snippet from Wired’s write-up, and some screen shots.

The folks at Geeky Gadgets have got ahold of some screenshots from Sony’s upcoming mirrorless Alpha camera. It appears that the innovation isn’t all on the outside: this camera will have a touch screen and a smart new interface to go with it.

Mirrorless cameras are becoming popular because they put big sensors in small bodies with interchangeable lenses, and Sony’s concept added typical Sony Style. But looks are nothing without a good product, and these screen shots show that Sony has decided to abstract the interface, forgetting about apertures and shutter speeds and instead focussing on their effects.

For instance, we know that opening up the lens shortens depth-of-field and throws the background out of focus, making the subject pop. Sony lets you control this by touching a button and sliding an on-screen control for “Bkground Defocus”. The menu screens are big and colorful, too, instead of the cryptic text lists we’re used to.

In fact, going by these leaked shots it looks as if there won’t be many buttons at all on this camera. Even the mode setting dial is a big on-screen graphic (shaped just like a dial!)

How do you feel about obvi-cam?

In the future we will carry our TVs in our pockets. And the future appears to be now!

Enter the Optoma Pico PK-101 Pocket Projector for iPhone/iPod. It’s kind of amazing.

The versatile Pico PK-101 takes projector miniaturization to an entirely new level. This pocket-sized device is the perfect travel companion, allowing you to give presentations anywhere you go. The bundled connection kit makes it a snap to attach the Optoma Pico to your iPhone, iPod classic or iPod touch.

The Pico Projector is small and light enough to fit in your pocket and strong enough to display pictures, videos or presentations on most surfaces varying in size from 6 to 60 inches.

It’s a party movie in your pants!

The other exciting technology I came upon this week was Popular Science’s new searchable archives. 137 years of free browsing! I mean, 137 years of archives. Not that you’ll browse for 137 years… anyway.

It’s cool.

Like this… and this:

Have a great weekend!