Randal Ford remembers the first animal portrait he ever made. “Before I photographed any dogs or cats or tigers or lions,” he said, “I photographed a cow.”A graduate of Texas A&M, Ford fell in love with photography when he was a college student, two decades ago. “I shot stuff for the school paper, everything from sports to news features,” he said. While working as a professional photographer after graduation, Ford was approached by DJ Stout, partner and creative director at Pentagram Design who’d previously worked at Texas Monthly, for which Ford would shoot more than twenty cover photos, with a surprising request.“He saw all these colorful, dynamic portraits of people that I was doing and he was like, ‘Hey, do you think you could do…