Photographs

The New York woman who sued Oscar De La Hoya -- seeking $25 million for slander and claiming she was pressured to recant the legitimacy of photos she allegedly took of the boxer in fishnet stockings, high heels and other women's garb -- has dismissed her claim. Facing a possible countersuit by De La Hoya, model and former stripper Milana Dravnel dismissed her case Friday after an expert assessed the photos as "doctored," De La Hoya's attorney said.

If you live in Southern California, you've seen them: 8-by-10 celebrity glossies staring at you from the hallowed walls of hardware stores, beauty salons, liquor stores, car dealerships and seemingly every hamburger stand in L.A.

The photos of the South China tiger taken by a farmer seemed too good to be true. After all, no member of the endangered big cat family had been seen in the wild since the 1960s. This weekend, local authorities revealed after months of delay that the pictures had been staged using a poster cutout. Police also produced a paw made of wood they said had been used to make prints in the snow.

When you LOL at silly pictures of cats with even sillier captions, Ben Huh laughs all the way to the bank. For the uninitiated, that's Web shorthand for "laugh out loud," an abbreviation that is common in e-mails, instant messages and online chat rooms. Huh, a Seattle entrepreneur, has built a mini-empire on the unique brand of humor illustrated by the "LOLcats" craze: photos with captions punctuated by deliberately misspelled words and mangled phrases.

Growing up in rural Nebraska, I always felt I was robbed of some quality time exploring the beauty of the beach. For the last five months I was assigned to do just that -- cruise the coast and explore select Southern California beaches from Santa Barbara to San Diego. The results are 11 photo galleries found at latimes.com/beach. More photos on Page B5

He didn't have to cobble together a show when he decided to turn his shoe repair shop into an art gallery. All Greg Papazian had to do was reach into the shoe box that for 35 years held a one-of-a-kind photographic record of Los Angeles in its glittery rock 'n' roll heyday. He was a high school junior when he turned a visit to an Allman Brothers concert at the Sunset Strip's Whisky a Go Go into a gig of his own -- as club photographer for the legendary hub of Los Angeles' rock scene.

Reaching a milestone in the search for Earth-like planets in the universe, two teams of astronomers say they have parted the curtains of space to take the first pictures of planets beyond our solar system. The first team, led by UC Berkeley researchers, used the Hubble Space Telescope to take a picture of a giant planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away. "It's almost science fiction," said Berkeley astronomer Eugene Chiang.

Photographers Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher have devoted 30 years and 12 books to the traditions, culture and people of Africa -- a faraway land that they have brought closer to home by teaming with the Bowers Museum for the exhibit "Passages," currently on display. Some 100 of their photographs on view are based on a 10-year "African Ceremonies" study in which they documented ceremonies and rituals marking transition points from birth to death.

Like any other proud parent, two-time Oscar-winning actress Jessica Lange has a "million-and-twelve color snapshots" of her three children. But when daughters Shura and Hannah and son Walker were little, Lange decided she would document their growing up with more "substantial" portraits. "I had an old Nikon," says the star of such films as "Frances," "Tootsie" and "Blue Sky."

Researchers gathered recently in a small darkened lab near Santa Barbara, nervously pacing as a digital camera snapped hundreds of images of a shard of pottery resting a few feet below the lens. There was good reason for their anxiety. The terra-cotta fragment is about 3,000 years old and was inscribed with five lines of text that could alter knowledge about the existence of an ancient Judean kingdom.