How do you capture a celebrity with their guard down? Photograph them with their beloved dog. Pet photographers Charlie Nunn and Raymond Janis, who run Charlie Nunn Photography in West Hollywood, California, created 200 portraits of celebrities with their canine best friends, which they collected into a book, “Hollywood Tails: Famous Faces and the Dogs They Love” (Weldon Owen, an imprint of Insight Editions).

“We didn’t have to manufacture much,” says Janis of making the portraits. “It’s a person and their dog, usually the one being the other feels most at ease around. Our job was just to capture how that showed up naturally.”

How they found subjects: The first participants were people in their existing client base. “After that, it got harder,” admits Janis. They used IMBD to track down celebrity publicists and managers, and if that wasn’t fruitful, they contacted their potential subjects directly on social media. “More than once we got a firm ‘no’ from a rep, then a fast ‘yes’ once we reached the person directly,” Janis explains. When celebrities then shared their portraits on social media, that became “the best introduction [to others] we could ask for.”

The importance of quick work: The biggest hurdle to persuading a subject to sit for a portrait was the perception that it would take hours. “We had to prove we could work fast. Very fast,” says Janis. And they did. For example, for actress Kristin Chenoweth, whose schedule was packed, they set up a backdrop at a hotel where she was already in hair and makeup for an event and spent just 10 minutes with her. 

Amanda Arnold is a senior editor.