How Young Is Too Young to Be a Paparazzo?

When celebrities and paparazzi collide, the resulting picture is not always a pretty one. Hardened shutterbugs battle throngs of fellow photographers in the hunt for the next big money shot. It's an arena that can be downright ugly, nasty and even dangerous.

Blaine Hewison, left, and Austin Visschedyk are 15-year-old and work as paparazzi in Los Angeles.

(Courtesy Blaine Hewison and Austin Visschedyk)
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You'd certainly never expect to find two wide-eyed 15-year-olds in the middle of the mayhem, but young photographers Austin Visschedyk and Blaine Hewison have been making a name for themselves as paparazzi … and not always a good one.

"I took a picture of Adam Sandler, exclusive," Blaine recalled. "And he came up to me and said, 'So you're gonna be a dick.'"

"He was being really rude," Austin added.

Were they invading Sandler's privacy? Blaine doesn't think so.

"If you're a celebrity, you've gotta know that there's gonna be paparazzi," Blaine said. "It's a choice you make. If you don't want it, you can end it."

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Risky Business

These longtime best friends have gotten used to the chaos that comes along with life as a paparazzo. Over the past year, they've become fixtures in L.A.'s sometimes rough-and-tumble paparazzi scene. This offbeat career path may seem strange to some, but not to Blaine or Austin.

"We've lived in Hollywood all our lives," Austin said. "And it was just kind of like, yeah, you go to a restaurant and you see a celebrity … and you think after a while, we can start taking pictures of these people and actually make some money."

Blaine convinced his father to invest in a camera, and he and Austin got to work. "We started to, you know, get out there and be known a lot more, get business cards made, start to network with the people around us and where we live," Blaine said.

Jane Seiberts, Austin's mother, realizes that most parents don't dream of having their child become a paparazzo. "We'd obviously heard all the things that everybody else hears about the paparazzi," Seiberts said. "I mean there was a part of me like, are you sure you want to do this. … It's a little scary."