Portrait photography can run the gamut in type and style—everything from the traditional “head and shoulders” shot to lifestyle and environmental, candid and street, glamour, boudoir, maternity sessions and much more. View some of the photos of the week that caught our attention, and read the backstories on the how they were created.

Photographer Tomica Rašetina was a bit of a trickster for this post-wedding photo shoot on Brsec Beach in Croatia. It was 5 a.m., and the bride, Silvija, was up late the night before doing her hair and makeup. Rašetina wanted a candid of her, so she called out to her, “Just a moment while I change lenses.” She reached down to her bag but kept her eye on Silvija. “I was waiting to see what she was going to do so I could capture some spontaneous moment.”

Deborah Dantzoff met up with a couple who had flown to Santiago, Chile from New York to stay with one of their parents, in order to take some pre-wedding photos “so on the wedding day they felt more relaxed with my presence,” Dantzoff explains. The photographer was drawn to the symmetry of the house’s pool, as well as the pastel look that was coming through on her camera.

“After several tests and shots in that place, I ended up with that photograph of them sitting and more relaxed,” she says, however she did experiment further with the lines and angles as well.

“I think a lot of photographers have a love of photographing hands,” says photographer LeeAnn B Stephan who notes that she, too, is “in love with photographing hands” and always has been. “Hands tell a story in images.” So she absolutely took the chance to get an artistic hand shot during a shoot with her friends Cayla and Adairre.

“I loved the contrast of their hands together in that lovely soft window light,” she explains. “It was so dreamy and romantic, and there hands looked so elegant and graceful, just kind of floating in the air. I cranked up my ISO to increase the natural grain to avoid too much manipulation in post.”

Dariane Sanche wanted to explore traditional female-modeled beauty photography using a male model. “It’s easy to fall into the same patterns and techniques,” Sanche says, “working around what is known and what we are used to seeing.”

In Sanche’s view, “fashion should proliferate possibility, not constrain it.” So for this photo, she wanted to the viewer to “face a disregard for gender” to “open a beautiful window for discussion on stereotypes and all topics around it.”

Photographer Jimena Llamas found herself with a bride who she sensed wasn’t super comfortable with the day’s attention on her, nor the camera’s. So when it came to portraits, Llamas says, “I decided to tell her to put her wedding veil over them, for her to feel ‘protected,’ and since the groom was moving more comfortably around the camera, I asked him to take the lead and ask her to dance in order to allow her to stop overthinking so much and feeling so self-conscious.”

Llamas always tells her couples to relax and enjoy the moment they’re in when she’s photographing. Looking back on the photos from that day before and after this shot, she says, “I realized how important it is for the couple to feel comfortable being themselves and, at least for a moment,  forget that they are being photographed.”

Dig into our Photo of the Day archives for even more compelling imagery.