At TIFF, there are -- at a minimum -- hundreds of fans with cellphone and regular digital cameras, and they're ready and willing to feed gossip websites with snapshots. This is making it tougher for real paparazzi to make a living.
Photographs of Jake Gyllenhaal arriving at Pearson International Airport were quickly sent to gossip websites like Pink is the new Blog, while shots of Sienna Miller's Annie Hall meets Alice in Wonderland were online before the Factory Girl had made it to the VIP room.
Agencies are now popping up to take advantage of this material, and the new labour 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 it's toll on the paparazzi industry.
"We try to maintain a level of professionalism that just isn't there with those people," Mr. Sandler said. "They have no sense of what else is going on around them. They'll just stick their arm right into your shot."
Mr. 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 per cent of gross sales prices.
"They flood the market with substandard material," he said. "It can eat away at the business."