These Dogs Were Trained to Be Studio Photographers

Want to teach your dog a new trick? Try training it to do studio photography. That’s what a few dogs over in Japan were taught to do recently. You can see the results in the 3.5-minute video above, titled “PhoDOGrapher.”

The experiment was conducted by a group of pet food brands over in Japan leading up to “Smile Day” on February 5th.

“Our dogs are always the ones being photographed,” the companies write. “What if they could take pictures of us?”

First, they found three families of dog lovers who love taking pictures of their little furry friend. The humans were invited to a portrait studio for a family photo shoot. What they didn’t know, however, was that their dogs had been secretly trained to push a large red button — a shutter release mounted to the top of a Hasselblad medium format camera.

By pushing the button on command, the dogs turned the camera on their loving families for a series of portraits.

Here are the resulting portraits alongside portraits of the dog photographers:

So instead of buying a remote shutter release for your camera, try creating your own doggy shutter release to add another photographer to your family.