First, a little bit of background. A year and a half ago I got a camera for my birthday, and it just so happens that this camera looks like a cat:

Seriously. It’s the Necono Digital Camera, and not surprisingly it’s a Japanese product. Cat camera has four modes: it takes still photos, still photos with a self timer, it shoots video, and it has a time lapse feature.There’s a mode button to switch between the four modes. The cat’s right eye is the lens, while the left eye is the self timer sensor. The microphone (yeah, the video records audio, too) is just below the cat’s nose. All your photos and video are stored on a microSD card, and you can connect it to your computer via a micro USB cable to transfer its contents. Oh, and its feet are magnetic, which is how it’s perched on that pipe up there. It’s a pretty remarkable little piece of technology.

The first question people usually have is what the photos look like. I typically describe them as pretty lo-fi, a little bit like a cheap cell phone camera. But it can be all over the map. Some photos are better quality, some are totally terrible. Sometimes in focus, but not always; it’s a little bit of a gamble. Sometimes the colors are crazy and totally blown out. You never totally know what you’re going to get. In general though, cat camera does well outdoors with daylight, and less well indoors and at night. Here’s a photo I took in Budapest to give you an example:

Cat camera has a tumblr, if you’d like to see more photos: cat-camera.tumblr.com

I was given cat camera while I was living in Hungary, and I’ve taken it on all my travels in the last year and a half. I’ve been collecting short video clips along the way, not knowing exactly what I’d do with them. I’ve always thought it’d be fun to compile them somehow, though.

Enter my dear friend John Vanderslice. John’s gearing up to release his new record, Dagger Beach, next Tuesday. I kind of fell in love with one of the in-between tracks, “Interlude #1,” and thought it would complement the cat camera clips really nicely. So I put them all together and here’s where I ended up:

https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js Interlude #1 from Dianna on Vimeo.

Thanks to JV for permission to use the song! The record (which is totally great) is available at daggerbeach.com, and if you’d like to follow the travels of cat camera you can do so here.