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 eye-catching portraits and photos of the week that caught our attention, and read the backstories on how they were created.

LeeAnn B Stephan often collaborates with her friend Cayla, a muse of hers and a “multi-talented” artist, who Stephan says she tries to photograph “in the style of her paintings and sort of ‘paint’ her into them.”

“This multiple exposure was done in camera,” notesStephan, who photographed this handheld without a tripod. “If any of you own a Nikon D750, you’ll know that multiple exposures can be tricky as it’s all trial and error and a lot of ‘Let’s try that again’ since you can’t see your first exposure made. But I’ve really gotten the hang of the guessing game.”

In Asian cultures—including, Singapore, where photographer Tim Sim of The Good Citizen is based—the veiling of the bride before the ceremony is a special moment often performed by parents and family members who are parting with the bride before sending her down the aisle to start a life with her partner. “Most parents are overcome with emotion, great joy or sadness, or a mix of both,” Sim says.

There is certainly a mixture in this photo he captured: “The pride of the parents putting on the bride’s veil; the sadness of her grandmother sitting close by, who is very close to her; the genuine joy of the bride; the phone in hand, which tells a long and unique story in itself.”

Sim backed himself up against the wall in order to get this moment, as the room was rather small. “It was important not to use my wide angle as the distortion would have been jarring,” he notes. “Instead I opted to use the 35mm lens to tighten the frame so that the eyes would focus solely on the four subjects and the details within.”

Nina and Arno of A Bear Photography have hosted a few wedding photography workshops in South Africa, where they’re based, with their friend, Shanay Greene. They do a styled shoot for attendees to practice their skills on models, one of whom was Kate, an “absolute legend in the South African heat.” The photographers say they had to redo her makeup at one point during the shoot.

Wedding photographers, what was the last image you took of the last wedding in 2020? This one was Jonathan Coates‘ last, and it marked a pretty weird year for weddings in the UK, where only 15 guests could attend, and reception meals and dancing were off the table.

“Ash had surprised Laura with a mini-moon trip to London, and they departed that very night by train,” Coates says. “Feeling like this was still part of the story of their wedding day—and would be a great end to the set—I offered to drive them to the train station and capture their departure rather than simply wave them goodbye in a taxi.”

The couple sat between platforms as trains whizzed by, lit by the overhead lights in the station. Eyeing the symmetrical pillars, Coates lined up for a frame.

“I worked the scene for a few minutes whilst being conscious their train was due any second,” he recalls. “Once I had my composition, I asked them to get comfy and cuddle up to each other whilst I waited for a train to pass behind them. I switched to a 17mm lens so I could go wide and get lots of the train and environment in the shot. I wanted the train to have motion blur to add movement to the frame, but I needed the couple to be perfectly blur free, so I picked a shutter speed of 1/20 second as I knew shooting at 17mm, I could just about handheld that—with steady hands and feet—and keep the couple sharp.”

Coates chose the widest aperture possible so that the couple wouldn’t blend into the background. “I spurted out some random jibber-jabber to get a smile from the bride and boom, the shot was in the bag.”

It was unusually sunny-but-freezing day in Iceland this past May when photographer Bettina Vass hit the pavement for a couple’s pre-wedding portrait session. “We visited the Reykjanes Peninsula, where the North Atlantic ridge rises from the ocean,” Vass says. “There are so many beautiful locations here: craters, lava fields, a currently erupting volcano, bird cliffs, geothermally active areas and black sand beaches.”

The couple had just reunited in person since getting engaged, the bride-to-be coming from Austria to meet up with her future husband, who had moved to Iceland from the Philippines. “They wanted a last big adventure before having a very, small intimate wedding,” Vass explains.

In geothermally active areas, steam erupts from the ground as pressure dips in a geothermal reservoir. Vass and the couple approached one of these areas around 8 p.m., while the sun was still fairly high.

“Because of the harsh direct light, I knew I wanted to get some kind of a silhouette of them walking toward the cloud-looking steam,” says Vass, who waited patiently while the couple approached the top of the hill. She called on the available leading lines in the scene, like the fences and horizon lines, to draw the viewer’s eye to the couple. “I am a big fan of negative space, and I like to emphasize the power of Icelandic nature by focusing on the natural wonders that surround the couple.”

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