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. Discover the eye-catching portraits and photos that stopped us in our tracks this week, spotlighted here for the way the photographers prompted and focused on the couple embracing in their photo.

Lindsey Michelle of Lensy Michelle, based in Boston, ventured to Matunuck, Rhode Island, for a wedding between two surfers who met on a fitness-oriented dating site. The bride called their love story “Surfer Boy Meets Surfer Girl at 55 and 64,” and while they had originally only asked for a couple hours of coverage during the pinnacle parts of their wedding day, Michelle managed to talk them into a full day’s worth of documentation.

“I wanted images that captured them in their element and with the sport that brought them together,” Michelle says, “so I ended up showing up at 9 a.m. and staying until well after dark.” On the morning before marrying in a backyard ceremony—surrounded by their kids, grandkids and a live-in camper van that the couple had converted into a photo booth for their wedding guests—the bride and groom made their way to the beach for some portraits with their surfboards.

Traci Edwards of Adventure and Vow, based in the west coast of the United States, went to the rain forests of Puerto Rico for this elopement. She had never been there before, so she arrived a few days early to hike to all the locations they planned to hit up for the big day, capturing landscape shots of the sights for reference.

On the day of the elopement, they ventured on a 5-mile hike up a mountain that the couple had become familiar with (but had never summited) just as a thick blanket of fog rolled in. It was beautiful, Edwards recalls, but the fog blocked some spectacular views they would have had.

“I created some images during their elopement that I knew I could probably Photoshop for some fun creative landscape photos that would include them,” Edwards says. “It felt like a special way to combine their experience and the location all in one image.”

Sonja and Ivan of Paspartu Photography, based in Belgrade, Serbia, took to the streets with this engaged couple on a sunny afternoon in September, milling around with intermittent moments of the couple embracing. “We loved the couple’s contemporary style and beautiful chemistry, so we just let them walk down the streets of Belgrade and prompted them from time to time to dance a little,” the duo says. “We wanted them to be the stars of the photos and capture intimacy,” and in order to highlight their energetic and vibrant nature, they used slower shutter speeds to emphasize their movement.

Gwen Chew of Gwen Pixel Stop, based in Singapore, would ideally not have to deal with the country’s heat and humidity, but alas, that is one of the challenges of being a photographer in Singapore. Prompting her subjects to do things for the photo opp takes a bit of clever thinking. Asking the couple to run to each other, for instance, would cause them to break out into a sweat, most likely, and make the rest of the shoot a bit uncomfortable. So Chew waited until the end of the shoot to ask this couple, “Imagine that both of you have been away from one another for more than a year—how would you react when you saw one another?” They ran to each other, and she captured an authentic shot of the couple embracing.

They were on a beach where Chew had planned to position them on a drainage pipe, but high tide hid the pipe so she decided to strip back the background and make this an ultra minimalist shot. “I was supposed to be just capturing a series of them running towards each other,” she explains, “but when I was editing the photographs, there was a sudden thought: Why not combine all the frames together to show people how it would look without showing a series of individual photographs?” She used Photoshop to put this multiple exposure together, motivated to show people that “photographs can be shown in many different forms.”

Flora Gibson, who’s based in Big Sur, California, admits that she had struggled with photographing in this valley for years because it’s almost always crowded, and the harsh shadows cast by the mountains above making metering pretty difficult. “Other local photographers and I often gripe about this spot” because of the bright green in the lillies as well, and the “skin tones against the harsh neon green” doesn’t look great.

“While beautiful in person, it’s taken me years to make an image here that I’m proud of,” she says—until she captured this one of a couple embracing. “I took this image into Photoshop, adding a tilt-shift effect and cloning out the mountain to draw attention to the couple. I cloned more lillies above the couple to give the affect of them floating, surrounded by the flower.”

Dig into our Photo of the Day archives for even more compelling and eye-catching portraits and creative imagery that features directional light and silhouettes, movement and connection.