Aquarium selfies never turn out that great. The dim lighting and bluish cast from the water often make you look aquatic. Lucky for visitors to Kelly Tarlton’s Sea Life Aquarium in Aukland, New Zealand, the aquarium has a very talented photographer in residence, who will take your selfie for $2. The photographer’s name is Rambo, and she’s an octopus.
The animal trainers at the aquarium taught Rambo how to photograph visitors who visit her tank, with a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-TX30 camera. The camera is placed in a special rig that makes it easy for the octopus to take pictures with a single click of a button. Sony helped build the rig for Rambo, so it’s top-of-the-line. The rig is water resistant and can withstand some pretty forceful shocks. It’s got a big red button on it, too, so it’s easy for Rambo to press with one of her tentacles. All she has to do is slide a tentacle down a pipe, and press the button.
Her trainer, Mark Vette, said that the octopus got the hang of the camera very quickly. “When we first tried to get [Rambo] to take a photo, it only took her three attempts to understand the process,” he told Pop Photo.
Ever since, the aquarium’s resident “octographer” has been taking visitors’ photos at $2 a pop. All the money Rambo makes goes directly to the aquarium. Recently, she took a class photo of a group of kids on a field trip. The kids look thrilled, as they pose for the picture. Of course, Sony was only too happy to capture the spectacle on film and tout the superb underwater performance of the TX30, which has 5x optical zoom and full HD video recording capabilities, among other things.
