Nikon’s dog camera takes a photo every time your mutt is excited

Nikon’s latest marketing effort for one of its Coolpix compacts posed the question, “What if emotions could take photographs?”

The stunt involved adapting the Coolpix L31 shooter so that a dog could use it to snap photos of things that excited it during its daily walk.

The entire outfit comprises the camera, a specially designed camera case, and a heart-rate monitor strap that communicates with the case via Bluetooth to cause the shutter to trigger when the dog’s heartbeat increases.

The lucky “pho-dog-rapher” (that’s Nikon’s term, by the way) chosen for the Heartography experiment was Grizzler the border collie.

Despite having no previous photographic experience, the mutt did remarkably well with his somewhat bulky camera kit, capturing an array of places, animals and objects that evidently got his heart racing as he went about exploring his local neighborhood.

The thing is, it seems like just about everything pushed Grizzler’s ticker into overdrive, from tins of baked beans to crabs in a fish tank to clouds in the sky. His varied collection of artful(ish) images also includes pictures of other dogs, a set of steps, and some broken egg shells.

If Grizzler could talk, he’d be the first to admit he’s no Henri Cartier-Bresson, but with this particular piece of tech we reckon he could comfortably take on the best feline photographers kitted out with the collar-worn Catstacam.

This isn’t the first time a tech company has come up with the idea of strapping a photographic device to a dog. GoPro, for example, last year came up with the Fetch, a harness that can hold a GoPro camera, while K9 Carts promises steadier footage with its brilliant Canine Film Stabilization Dolly.