“Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration”, a book review

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nv_cover__9

Troy Paiva is one of my favorite photographers of late. I love his choice of subjects – googie architecture, abandoned buildings, junk yards and the southwest desert. He shoots almost exclusively at night and uses a combination of colored flashes and LED lights to “paint” his subjects.

Troy published his first book of night-time photography, Lost America: The Abandoned Roadside West in 2003. His newest book,
Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration continues his explorations into abandoned scenery, night time photography, surreal coloring, and imaginative vision.

I found a full review on Epic Edits, a new (to me) photo blog.

More of Troy’s work is available on his Flickr page.

[via Epic Edits ]

Lomography + JPG + Photojojo San Francisco & NYC Meetups

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Calling all San Francisco and New York City Lomographers!

Our friends at JPG Magazine and Photojojo are teaming up with us for a very cool event on September 3rd.

Simultaneously, in both cities (well, 3-hours apart actually), we will be holding a meet-up at sunset in Dolores Park in SF and at Union Square Park in NYC. (Round-up begins at 7pm, but shooting will start when the sun goes down.)

Lomography + JPG + Photojojo San Francisco & NYC meet-ups

Miroslav Tichy

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Am so enthralled with the photographic work of Czech artist Miroslav Tichy, who made cameras out of cardboard tubes, thread spools, rubber bands, and other similar things, and then photographed public scenes in his small hometown. He developed the negatives in a bucket at night, because he didn’t have a darkroom. Later, he said that the defects and ugliness were where the true art happened.

Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you’re doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.

[via This Is That ]

The Conet Project

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conet
For more than 30 years the Shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the worlds intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of “Numbers Stations”.

Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication. Spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified Shortwave receivers. The encryption system used by Numbers Stations, known as a “one time pad” is unbreakable. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recipients once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is.

These stations use very rigid schedules, and transmit in many different languages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round.

High frequency radio signals transmitted at relatively low power can travel around the world under ideal propagation conditions, which are affected by local RF noise levels, weather, season, and sunspots, and can then be received with a properly tuned antenna of adequate size, and a superb receiver. However, spies often have to work only with available hand held receivers, sometimes under difficult local conditions, and in all seasons and sunspot cycles. Only very large transmitters, perhaps up to 500,000 watts, are guaranteed to get through to nearly any basement-dwelling spy, nearly any place on earth, nearly all of the time. Some governments may not need a numbers station with global coverage if they only send spies to nearby countries.

Although no broadcaster or government has acknowledged transmitting the numbers, a 1998 article in The Daily Telegraph quoted a spokesperson for the Department of Trade and Industry (the government department that, at that time, regulated radio broadcasting in the United Kingdom) as saying, “These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are. People shouldn’t be mystified by them. They are not for, shall we say, public consumption.”

A sample of these recordings is available at http://www.last.fm/music/The+Conet+Project. More information about the project is available at http://www.irdial.com/conet.htm. Although the project is currently sold out, the sound files are available elsewhere on the net. The location and whereabouts of said files are left as an exercise to the reader.

[via The Conet Project ]