The Rio de Janeiro Olympics kick off on August 5 for some two weeks of competitive games drawing athletes as well as audiences from around the world. As they prepare to cover the event, Reuters photographers look back on their favourite pictures from past Olympics where they captured the action on the ground as well as the participants' tears and joy that followed. (Photo by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

Michael Pankratz’s intriguing works focus specifically on the feet of tarantulas – an appendage that many have perhaps never focused on. The extreme close-ups of tarantulas’ “paws” show fine, colourful hairs, and sharp claws. Here: Brachypelma albopilosum, foot detail. (Photo by Michael Pankratz/Caters News Agency)

Maxime Taccardi is an artist who is most notable for his unusual method – creating his pieces using his own blood. He studied art in collage, his thesis focusing on the monstrosity and what is considered abnormal by society. Currently he is a middle school art teacher, but plans to continue furthering his creative career. His catalogue of work is varied, including painting, drawing, filmmaking and music.

Winner. “I took this vertical image in the Quarry Bay district of Hong Kong during the dusk ‘blue hour’, when there was a perfect balance between the ambient light in the sky and the artificial lights of the high-rise residential buildings”. (Photo by Jatinder Heer/The Guardian)

Born with a rare condition, the artist has chronicled her life in portraits – capturing everything from her tattooed prosthetics to the tentacled creature she stitched together on the shores of Naoshima. Here: Ophelia (2013). From a series of photos of imagined women exhibited at the 2013 Aichi Triennale. Here, Katayama invokes Hamlet’s tragic heroine, after the painting by British pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais. (Photo by Mari Katayama/The Guardian)

If you're not familiar with Terry's work, he takes boring, everyday objects and makes them come alive! The best thing about it is that it can be enjoyed by everyone. Young or old, we can all get a good chuckle out of his hilarious Bent Objects.

“Reem Riyashi (1982 – 14 January 2004) was a Palestinian mother of two from Gaza City who killed herself and four Israelis at the Erez crossing on January 14, 2004 in a suicide bombing attack. Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade claimed that the attack by Riyashi was a joint operation mounted as a response to weeks of Israeli incursions into West Bank cities that had left about 25 Palestinians dead”. – Wikipedia

Photo: Reem Saleh Al-Riyashi, the first woman suicide bomber from Hamas, is shown with her daughter, Duha, in the Gaza Strip. She was married and the mother of two young children. (Photo by Getty Images)

Chinese-born street artist DALeast, whose work is recognizable for its unique style anywhere he paints, has left a trail of stunning 3D graffiti spanning several continents. Based in South Africa with his wife, the 29-year-old artist spends around half a year traveling around the world and painting his graffiti artworks in different cities. Each piece of his street art looks as it’s made out of thousands of metal shards, which all come together beautifully to shape different animals, birds or humans in action.