“I Am Sitting in a Room” is one of the best known works of experimental music composer Alvin Lucier. In the piece, he records himself speaking, plays it back while re-recording it, and repeated until the words become unintelligible and simply “the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself”.

YouTube user canzona decided to pay homage to Lucier, and “covered” the piece in his own room using YouTube as the medium.

I started this project exactly 1 year ago, almost to the hour. The final version is a lot different than I thought it would be, I was expecting a lot more digital video noise, and a lot less digital audio noise. Let this be a lesson, though, always be careful how you convert your digital media!

An homage to the great Alvin Lucier, this piece explores the ‘photocopy effect’, where upon repeated copies the object begin to accumulate the idiosyncrasies of the medium doing the copying. Full words: I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice as well as the image of myself, and I am going to upload it to YouTube, rip it from YouTube, and upload it again and again, until the original characteristics of both my voice and my image are destroyed. What you will see and hear, then, are the artifacts inherent in the video codec of both YouTube and the mp4 format I convert it to on my computer. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a digital fact, but more as a way to eliminate all human qualities my speech and image might have.

Here’s the original video before the 1,000 copies:

This is similar to the JPG generation loss experiments we posted last year. Experiments with VHS generation loss are also pretty interesting.

(via Boing Boing)

Octopuses are known to be the most intelligent invertebrate, and this clever guy also seems to have an eye for pricey camera gear and a playful sense of humor.

Diver Victor Huang was exploring off the coast of Wellington, New Zealand, when he happened upon the octopus. Like something out of a horror movie, a tentacled arm reached out and seized his own arm, and then carried off his bright blue Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS2. The camera was still recording video in 720p.

Huang wrote in his YouTube description:

While trying to get video of a wild octopus, it suddenly dashed towards me and rips my shiny new camera from out of my hands, then swims off, all while the camera is recording! he swam away very quickly like a naughty shoplifter. after a 5 minute chase, I placed my speargun underneath him and he quickly and curiously grabbed hold of the gun as well, giving me enough time to reach in and grab the camera from out of his mouth. I didn’t feel threatened at all during the whole ordeal. he seemed to be fixated on the shiny metallic blue digital camera. the only confusing behavior was how he dashed off with it like a thief…

Huang said the “cheeky” octopus finally returned his camera, albeit reluctantly.

(via Metro.uk.co)

Here’s a fun little tilt-shift, time-lapse video by The Bitter*Girls showing a sumo wrestling match in Japan. The two techniques make the video look almost like a clay animation, with little-big people trying to toss each other out of the ring.

(via Laughing Squid)

This video, created by PhotoErrant, shows a Canon 7D shooting at 8 frames per second on high-speed continuous mode. This definitely isn’t something you should try yourself, since it whacks hundreds of shutter actuations off the lifespan of your camera and exposes the sensor to dust. Luckily for us, there’s people willing to do these experiments and upload them to YouTube.

Adobe is working on a new feature for Photoshop called “Content Aware Fill”, and posted a mind-boggling demonstration of it on YouTube. The description states:

One of the biggest requests we get of Photoshop is to make adding, removing, moving or repairing items faster and more seamless. From retouching to completely reimagining an image, heres an early glimpse of what could happen in the future when you press the delete key.

Basically it allows you to alter or create reality in photographs as easily as selecting an area and running the feature. Gone will be the days when photojournalists are caught with embarrassing patterns created by improperly using the stamp tool. The demonstration is so amazing that many commenters are saying it’s fake, going as far as to say it looks… “photoshopped”?

What do you think of this feature and the sneak peek? Is it too good to be true, or will it change the way we think about photography forever?

(via PopPhoto)

There’s a new video on YouTube showing a gigantic shipping container camera promoting a Samsung camera. In the video, bystanders can actually use the “camera” by inserting some money into a coin slot, and then having someone jump onto the massive shutter button on top of the shipping container. The resulting photograph is then displayed on a gigantic screen atop a nearby building.

It looks like this whole thing is simply a viral video created by Samsung. Here are some indicators:

• The video was posted by cr8yourworld, which looks like an account created specifically for this campaign by Samsung.
• Can you imagine the lawsuits Samsung would face if this thing were actually real, and people started falling off the container while pressing the “shutter”?
• There’s a square helicopter at the end

Anyhow, fake or not, it’s a pretty fun idea. If only they actually created something like this (albeit safer) in some big city.

(via Trend Hunter)

This amazing video clip shows the amazing collision of two vortex rings. Imagine the kind of smoke photographs you could make if you had this setup!

Anyone know how to reproduce this? Tell us in the comments!

(via Boing Boing)

On an unrelated note, did you know that the vortex ring gun is currently being developed?

Here’s a portion of the Judge Joe Brown episode that aired Monday in the US. The case involved a woman who felt cheated when the wedding photographer she hired delivered poor results after using a Canon Rebel XTi, 18-55mm kit lens, and a 70-300mm. What’s interesting is how Judge Joe Brown actually seems to know a thing or two about photography.

It’s funny how the defendant shot “hundreds of weddings” without knowing what the speed of her 70-300mm lens is.

This isn’t related to photography, but it’s something that I’m working on, so I thought I’d share it with you all.

Visited.org is a new website that allows you to watch YouTube videos voted on by keyword. Anyone can submit a YouTube link and a single word they think describes the video (i.e. “funny”, “scary”, “amazing”, “interesting”), and others can vote on whether the keyword describes the video well.

If a video is popular enough, it gets promoted to the front page and to the keyword page. This hopefully makes it so you can just sit down and watch exactly the kind of video you want to see, without all the other noise and garbage that other websites (i.e. YouTube’s browse) are filled with.

I’m building this service for a class here at UC Berkeley, but it’s also an experiment to see if this kind of submission and voting system works well for surfacing quality videos. It’s a community-powered website, so if any of you have time to submit videos you enjoy or vote on videos other people submitted, we’d appreciate the help!

We need some early users to get this thing rolling. Feel free to share your thoughts or suggestions in the comments here.

This past Monday, Japanese lens corp Tamron launched a new 12 week video series on their YouTube channel geared towards helping beginners understand their equipment. Each video is 1 minute long, and will cover topics such as white balance, RAW vs. JPEG, and more. Once this introductory series is complete, they plan on posting intermediate and advanced videos as well.

If you just got a DSLR and would like to be brought up-to-speed for a minute a week, then this might be a YouTube channel to subscribe to.

(via Photography Bay)