Two third party Python modules imageio and visvis make it easy to load and view images. The modules come with the pyzo scientific package or can be downloaded separately. Module imageio can read many image file formats as shown in
http://imageio.readthedocs.org/en/latest/formats.html
You could also replace your image file name directly with a URL containing an image, for example
image_file = "Lake2.jpg"
could be changed to
image_file = "http://i.imgur.com/3MnBqHh.jpg"
and your picture would simply come from the internet.