According to a top paparazzo, amateur camera-phone photographers are putting the squeeze on celebrity photographers.

German Hans Paul, who says he once earned $120,000 for a picture of a then-pregnant Julia Roberts, said fees for paparazzi had been driven to new lows as even fans and autograph hunters now know how to market their pictures.

The advancements in camera-phone technology have made camera-phones cheap enough and the quality of the photographs good enough to be used widely and be useful at the same time. Furthermore, online outlets have made it incredibly easy for ordinary people to be linked with newspapers and other media to sell pictures to them directly. We covered one such outlet last December.

Mr Paul highlighted the example of the pictures of the execution of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as evidence of how images captured on a mobile phone can create news in any media. He said: “There is no doubt that we paparazzi are suffering from this. There is hardly any money to be made in the everyday business.”

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