Surf culture is an incredible thing. The community and industry that has sprung up around surfing is marvelous to behold. Often products designed with surfing in mind receive a wider audience, and that is precisely the story behind the success of the Go Pro camera.
Go Pro cameras are rugged, waterproof cameras that are very simple but used widely in action sports. They can be mounted to sporting equipment, like a surfboard, and capture the action without worry that a drop or spill will destroy them. They have no external monitor where you can see what you're shooting, but since the point for most Go Pro users is just to capture the action without taking away from the experience, the monitor isn't missed.
Nick Woodman invented the waterproof camera to capture his surfing in pictures. The cameras have come a long way, now offering quality video that is shot at a wide-angle to capture the most action possible. The New Yorker article, "We Are A Camera" by Nick Paumgarten, details how surf culture helped popularize and refine the Go Pro camera, which has now gone public on the stock market to great success,
"In the next few years, with Schmidt testing it out on surfing trips and sending back astonishing images, Woodman made refinements, and started making money, too. He traveled around the country in a 1974 VW van he called Biscuit, to surf shops and trade shows (and did a couple of appearances on QVC); to raise extra funds he sold belts made of seashells he’d picked up in Bali. At surfing events, he handed out cameras to pros."
The popularity of the Go Pro camera is no surprise to surfers who have been using Go Pros for a long time to capture epic surfing, (and some even more epic wipeouts.)
Perhaps the next time you're out catching waves, you'll have the next multi-milion dollar idea that brings a little piece of surf culture to the world at large.
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