Photographers

In her first West Coast show, "Explosure," photographer Tierney Gearon is a loving matchmaker of moments. But bringing together compatible images would make for a dull marriage, so she conjoins the unlikeliest of pairs through double exposure. Little girls dancing are superimposed on a background of brown bears from a museum diorama. A woman holds a white peacock, the field where she stands dissolving into the ripples of a beach.

They show up with lunch sacks and stuffed bears, an occasional doll. On Wednesday morning, most simply walked up the sidewalk with their parents in tow to the green, wrought-iron gate. One arrived in a shiny, black Audi SUV whose driver popped out to open the huge door for his charge. After a moment, a pair of tiny feet clad in hot-pink Crocs sandals dangled out and another youngster headed into the First Presbyterian Nursery School in Santa Monica. They are preschoolers.

Say goodbye to gray freeways, black clothing and brown haze and head for the hills. CaliforniaFallColor.com tells you where you can find the best fall foliage within driving distance of Los Angeles or San Francisco. What's hot: New England is not the only place that puts on a show of red, orange and yellow after summer fades. You can get the California Fall Color Report by RSS for weekly updates on how the trees are progressing through their cycle and where the best spots are to see the color.

Nearly four decades after their deaths, four combat photographers received a museum burial Thursday as family, friends and former colleagues recalled how the men gave their lives to show the world "Vietnam as they saw it." A helicopter carrying the four photographers was shot down over a mountainside in southern Laos on Feb. 10, 1971. Human remains were recovered in 1998, along with wreckage including camera parts, film and broken watches.

Can Ken Starr tame Malibu's rabid paparazzi? That's what Malibu officials are hoping as they turn to the independent counsel who investigated President Clinton's involvement with White House intern Monica Lewinsky to help them craft restrictions on "pap packs" that descend on the celebrity-rich coastal town. Malibu officials say their town has been overrun by members of the celebrity media, who camp out at the city's few shopping centers and follow celebrities down Pacific Coast Highway.

A paparazzo trying to photograph and videotape actor Matthew McConaughey at the beach Saturday told police he was attacked by a mob of surfers who threw his camera in the ocean and struck him. The 29-year-old paparazzo from Santa Monica told sheriff's deputies that a large group of surfers near Paradise Cove in Malibu approached him and other paparazzi about 2 p.m. and demanded that they stop taking pictures and videotaping.

After hundreds of Internet threats and the mobilization of sheriff's deputies by air, land and sea, Saturday's much-anticipated revival of the paparazzi-surfer war in Malibu came down to this: One woman with a handwritten sign and an unflinching desire to make a point.

Nailing down the facts in two June brawls between paparazzi and Malibu locals would seem to be as easy as a mouse click. Video and still cameras captured the beach fracases from multiple angles, and the footage was posted online for all to see. But a month later, much remains unclear. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has not charged anyone in the incidents, and one surfer says a knife wielded by a paparazzo was edited out of the video sold to Internet gossip sites.

To the mortgage crisis and the energy crunch and the devalued dollar, add this: a recession in the Britney market. The young woman who rose and fell (and fell and fell) in the paparazzi's strobe lights seems to have put bizarre public displays behind her, and the photographers who made hundreds and thousands -- and in some cases, hundreds of thousands -- capturing her missteps must look elsewhere for celebrities more predictably unpredictable. "She's boring.

Depending on the city official, the testimony of singer John Mayer and actors Milo Ventimiglia and Eric Roberts at Los Angeles City Hall on Thursday was either a courageous stand against the dangerous tactics of the paparazzi or a foolish waste of time. The performers were the first speakers at the inaugural meeting of a task force of elected officials, law enforcement leaders and others investigating ways to regulate what they described as an aggressive new breed of tabloid photographers.