Paparazzi title being taken over by cell phone photographers

TORONTO -- At a Toronto Film Festival party last Friday, professional paparazzi could only sit and wait behind the barricades, excluded from the fun.

But that doesn't mean you'll never see photos from inside the event. Many guests had cell phone cameras poised, hoping to snap a shot good enough to send to any of the dozens of Web sites hungry for fresh celebrity sightings that mainstream media outlets won't have.

"I'd send it to Go Fug Yourself if it turned out," said Maxine Mader, a 23-year-old fighting the crowds, snapping away with her camera phone.

Such is the reality of the new citizen paparazzi, where regular men and women within shutter range of celebrities can use their cell phone cameras, and nerve, to launch themselves onto gossip sites and even into the pages of Us Weekly.

Some take the pictures for cash, participating in a new industry for amateur photography that is quickly challenging the role of professional lensmen. But most do it just to play a part in tabloid culture, receiving no money and no credit, remaining as nameless to the public as they are to the A-list celebrity at whom they aimed their flash.

But the new wave of citizen paparazzi who make it past the velvet ropes are causing concern to those running the events and the pros who earn their living shooting them.

"It's frustrating. They can go places you can't," said Toronto freelance photographer Tom Sandler. "But that's the world we live in now."

Melanie Greco, publicist for the Four Seasons Hotel, agrees. "It's something we're finding more and more difficult to control." The hotel has been infiltrated this week by many citizen paparazzi hoping to get that money shot of George Clooney in his PJs or Brangelina (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) engaging in some PDA.

The hotel has strict policies barring photography in its public areas.

But while photographers and camera crews employed with a media organization generally respect the rules of film festival engagements, guests wielding digital cameras are harder to control.

"If they take pictures, we don't condone that behavior but it's not like we're going to jump on top of them or anything," Greco said.

Agencies are now popping up to take advantage of this material, and the new labor force that provides it.

A site called Mr Paparazzi.com encourages visitors to send photographs of celebrities, and features a gallery of amateur shots of Pamela Anderson and Britney Spears, each plastered with the dollar figure paid to the contributor.

"If you get something good, don't hang around, send us the pictures NOW!" the site screams. "This will increase your chances of making BIG bucks."

This coaching, and coaxing, is taking its toll on the paparazzi industry.

"We try to maintain a level of professionalism that just isn't there with those people," Sandler said. "They have no sense of what else is going on around them. They'll just stick their arm right into your shot."

Sandler said that because cellphones and inexpensive digital cameras are now equipped to transfer large files, photographs taken by untrained shooters are now of sufficient quality to appear in newspapers and in magazines.

And because members of the citizen paparazzi will often accept lower rates, he worries that prices will fall for all photographers. While some sites pay a one-time fee, others offer no fee, or, like Getty-owned Scoopt, pays members 40 percent of gross sales prices.

"They flood the market with substandard material," he said. "It can eat away at the business."