Your cat or your dog, printed: what works, and what fails.

The full guide. How to photograph an animal that will not pose, why fur is the hard part, which item suits which coat colour, and the case of a memorial gift. Five minutes.

A gift with an animal on it is never neutral: either it is kept for years, or it goes in a cupboard the same evening. The difference almost never comes from the item. It comes from the photo.

Why an animal photo is harder than a photo of a person

A human face has a clean outline: skin, combed hair, shoulders. An animal does not. Fur has no edge — it is thousands of fine, translucent strands, and exactly what makes the animal lovely in real life is what makes it difficult to print.

In practice: when the photo is cut out to sit on a mug or a t-shirt, whatever was behind the fur is carried along with it. If that was a white wall, nobody notices. If it was a patterned sofa, a wooden floor and a houseplant, you get fragments of all three around the animal — a halo, most visible on dark fabric or on natural-coloured cotton.

That is why the preview is shown, enlarged, before payment rather than after: the halo is visible there.

The photo that works, in four points

• A plain background. A wall, a door, a sheet, a sofa in one solid colour. This matters far more than everything else put together.
• At the animal’s eye level. Crouch or lie down; do not shoot from standing. A photo taken from above flattens the muzzle and stretches the back.
• Daylight, no flash. Near a window, with the animal facing it. Flash turns animal eyes green or blue, and an animal’s eye is not as easy to retouch as human red-eye.
• Burst mode. An animal will not hold a pose for three seconds. Hold the shutter, take forty, throw away thirty-nine. That is what wildlife photographers do, amateurs included.

The trick that turns the head at the right moment: an unusual noise just before you press — a rustling bag, a short whistle. Once only, or the effect is gone.

To check a photo is sharp enough before ordering, the thirty-second test is explained here.

Which item, for which animal and which use

A white animal, a black animal

A dark coat is the classic failure, and it is not the camera’s fault. Your phone meters light across the whole frame: faced with a black dog in a bright room, it exposes for the room and leaves the animal as a silhouette with no detail. Two fixes, both free. Move the animal towards a window. Then tap the screen on the coat, not on the face — that tells the phone to expose for the dark area. The picture looks slightly too bright on screen; it prints right.

A white or cream animal has the opposite problem: it burns out against a light background and loses the muzzle. Photograph it against something darker than itself, and choose a dark item — a navy tote, a black t-shirt — so the silhouette reads.

As a rule: light animal, dark item; dark animal, light item. The preview settles it in five seconds.

The memorial gift

A good part of these orders are for an animal that has died. Two things are worth saying plainly.

First, there is no hurry. A photo printed three months later is worth more than one chosen the same week. Second, one photo is enough. The temptation is to put together a collage of every photo you have; a single image, large, looks like a portrait, while six small ones look like a contact sheet.

For that use the framed print does what the others cannot: it is looked at, not used. A first name and two dates underneath, in the text tool, are enough — and cost nothing extra.

In short

• Plain background. Everything else comes second.
• At the animal’s eye level, in daylight, no flash, burst mode.
• Light animal on a dark item, dark animal on a light item.
• Check the preview at full size before paying — that is where a halo shows.
• From $23.00, shipping included, printed to order near the delivery address.