Runway

Runway puts your pet mid stride, walking straight at the camera, down a mirror polished catwalk under a single hard spotlight, with the rest of the room dropped into total darkness.

It is the most cinematic thing in the catalogue. The floor throws a full reflection back, the light falls from directly overhead and carves the animal out of the black, and because the pose is a walk rather than a sit, the whole portrait has forward momentum in it. Nothing else we make moves like this.

We also shoot it the other way, on a bright white runway with the front row visible as a deep blur either side and camera flashes firing as bursts of white in the dark behind. That version is louder and more celebratory. The spotlight version is colder and more dramatic. They are genuinely different photographs of the same idea.

A walking animal is the hardest thing to get right, which is why the framing here is tighter and more deliberate than in our standing styles. What you get in exchange is the one pose that looks like your pet is going somewhere, which for a lot of owners is far more characteristic than any portrait of them sitting still.

It suits a confident walker, a dog that has always moved like it owns the corridor, and it is the best of these for a large print on a dark wall.