This Dog Took a Photo Every Time He Got Excited

Back in 2015 Nikon pulled a stunt where they turned an excitable dog into a photographer by rigging a camera system that is triggered by the dog’s heart rate. It’s going viral again in 2026.

Multiple large Instagram accounts have been sharing the adventures of Grizzler the dog this week, including Explaining (7.8 million followers), Art Daily Dose (22.4 million), Pubity (42.1 million), and Complex (10.7 million).

It’s an odd phenomenon and it’s not clear why the story resurfaced; perhaps they all copied each other one after another, or perhaps they were all supplied the content by a third party. In any case, millions are once again enjoying Grizzler’s photos.

The project by Nikon Asia was dubbed “Heartography“. The device monitored Grizzler’s heart rate and fed that data to a camera case holding a Nikon Coolpix. As Grizzler went about his daily business, if he saw something exciting enough to cause his heartbeat to quicken, it triggered the shutter.

The heart rate collar was worn around Grizzler’s neck and the camera case displayed his heart rate on an OLED screen. A set of buttons allowed the handler to choose the baseline heart rate that would trigger the shutter. Nikon Asia dubbed Grizzler a “phodographer”.

Grizzler’s photos were unsurprisingly of things like food, other dogs, children playing, cats, and other animals. Commenters on Instagram were most taken with Grizzler’s photo of a stack of corn oil boxes next to tins of baked beans. “Was it the corn oil or baked beans?” asks Dave Keystone. “We’ll never know.”

Last week, another dog, a sled dog, was also taking pictures. When a reporting team from the Associated Press in the Arctic Circle couldn’t find one of their Insta360 cameras, they looked high and low. It turns out one of the sled dogs had run off with the camera, but had managed to hit record during the robbery and captured some hilarious footage.

Dogs aren’t the only animal photographers: pigeons are also known to take cameras to the skies, including one in Boston in 2024.

Image credits: Photographs by Grizzler the Dog / Nikon Asia