Just One More Before Bedtime!

LOS ANGELES

Since February, Blaine, 15, and his best friend, Austin Visschedyk, 14, have been spending late nights skulking around nightclubs, restaurants and private parties, staking out the likes of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton (older women, all), declaring themselves the youngest paparazzi in the business.

“They’re pretty shocked to see us,” said Blaine, a thin, soft-spoken shutterbug who runs his own photography company, Pint Size Paparazzi.

In one sense, the boys are another example of precocious Hollywood youngsters, following their show-business dreams a little ahead of schedule. Viewed another way, however, they may be unprepared innocents, colliding with one of the roughest sides of the entertainment industry.

A few months ago, Austin said, the singer Erykah Badu ripped his camera out of his hands and deleted his photos. Blaine was recently pushed to the ground by a bouncer outside a restaurant; as he hit the pavement, Blaine said, he tried to tell the guard that he was just a kid.

“Why did you tell him that?” said a videographer, an adult, as Blaine recounted his war story at a recent red carpet event. “There’s no innocence in the paparazzi business, homey. I told you, once you cross over, you’re done. You’re on the dark side, homes.”

As residents of celebrity-filled West Hollywood, the boys have benefited from their everyday exposure to famous figures. When he was in second grade, Blaine photographed David Spade jogging by his house (the actor called him “pipsqueak paparazzi”). Seven months ago, the kids realized they could profit from this proximity, and Austin, the more outspoken of the two, suggested to Blaine’s father that he buy his son a $6,000 camera.

“I said, ‘Yeah, right,’” recalled Robert Hewison, 36, who owns a film production company. But Mr. Hewison relented, and the boys took to their skateboards, chasing after celebrity hot properties — Christina Aguilera, David and Victoria Beckham and Jenna Jameson — in hopes of making money, and maybe, a few famous friends.

“I’m going to let this go as far as it takes me,” said Blaine, fidgeting with his V800. “I want to be friends with the celebrities more than take photos of them. I kind of wish I was going to the parties with them.”

Austin has sold photos to The Daily News in New York and OK! magazine, among other publications, while an image Blaine shot of Ms. Spears extending her middle finger recently fetched $500 at a local art show.

“What struck me originally about them is that they both have a good eye,” said Brad Elterman, an owner of Buzz Foto, an agency that brokers sales of celebrity photos.

Initially, Mr. Elterman — who was 16 when he sold his first photograph of Bob Dylan — said the boys reminded him of himself. “These kids are so cookie-cutter American-looking,” he said. “It reminded me of a Spielberg film.”

When Mr. Elterman sold one of Austin’s photos of Kim Kardashian, a mischievous confidant of Ms. Hilton, to TMZ.com, he said, “The photo editor called me up and said, ‘This is the best photo of Kim Kardashian I have ever seen.’ I’ve been in this business for three decades, and I’ve never had a photo editor call about a photo. Ever.”

But Mr. Elterman no longer represents the diminutive pair. “I want to be able to sleep at night,” he said. “If something happened to one of these kids, I don’t know what I would do.”

Other professionals are disturbed at seeing Blaine, a high school sophomore, and Austin, a freshman, lingering outside nightclubs with thousands of dollars’ worth of camera equipment around their scrawny necks.

“In my opinion, 1,000 percent, they should not be doing this,” said Alison Silva, 27, a photographer who has a cast on his left arm (the result, he said, of being hit by Keanu Reeves’s car in the line of duty). “They don’t think like we do. Fights break out. A lot of the guys, they’re like, ‘What are these little guys doing here?’”

Even celebrities seem perplexed by their presence. A video on TMZ documented the actress Rose McGowan as she left a restaurant and discovered she was being photographed by Austin. “What’s wrong with this town?” she asked. Austin continued to coax a few extra poses out of the clearly conflicted Ms. McGowan, the star of “Grindhouse,” as she stepped into her car. “This is so wrong!” she exclaimed.

PORTFOLIO Austin Visschedyk’s candid of Kim Kardashian.

Initially, Blaine’s and Austin’s parents felt the same way. “I was apprehensive at first,” Mr. Hewison said. “I thought, ‘My kid is going out there with a bunch of paparazzi?’ But I’ve since come to really like a lot of them. There are some I’d be more than happy to have over for a dinner party.” Jane Sieberts, Austin’s mother and a furniture manufacturer in her early 50s, said, “I’m very supportive of it.” She added: “He’s a real bright kid. He’s careful. He can get just as injured in sports at school.” Both boys say they “do school” two times a week, visiting the City of Angels Independent Study School to drop off the tests and assignments they’ve completed at home. (Both enrolled at the school before pursuing their photography careers.) This affords them free time to shoot during the day, as they bike and skateboard around Sunset Plaza and other close-to-home hot spots. At night, their parents play chauffeur; Mr. Hewison has even installed a dashboard DVD player in his Porsche 911 to wile away the time as he waits for Blaine to finish work.

“I go out every day,” Austin said during a recent conversation in his mother’s bedroom, his blue eyes glued to the shoot-em-up video game “Halo 3.” “I start at like 9 a.m. until about 12:30, then break and then go back out at like 9 until whenever.”
“Blaine hardly ever goes out anymore,” Austin quickly added. “I go out, like three times as much as him.”

Blaine and Austin, friends for eight years, have always tried to outdo each other at sports, but their professional rivalry has a fiercer, more grown-up tenor. The two initially worked together on a single Web site, pintsizepaparazzi.com, but disagreements between the two boys’ parents over business matters led Austin to start his own site, austinseye.com.

“I didn’t like the idea that they were lumped together, because I don’t know what Blaine’s goals are,” Ms. Sieberts said. “Austin does a lot of art photography; he is not a paparazzi. So it was like, well, maybe they shouldn’t be so linked because they are going to be on separate paths.”

The boys are quick to point out the differences in their work. “My style is better,” Blaine said. “I have a more artsy look to my photographs. They’re not so posed.”

Asked who he thought was the better photographer of the two, Austin filled five “Halo 3” competitors full of virtual lead before answering, “Who do you think?”

While they are professional rivals, the boys call themselves “best friends forever.” And some in the entertainment business want to make sure of that.

“You do have the Hollywood access, you have the unusual after-school-job sort of thing, but to me that’s all backdrop,” said Jeffrey Wank, a talent agent who read a news account of Blaine and Austin, and got them a deal to develop a reality show with a production company, World of Wonder, which has produced such series as “Tori & Dean: Inn Love” and “Wife, Mom, Bounty Hunter.”

“The core of it is the personalities of Blaine and Austin, and the relationship the two share,” Mr. Wank said. “That’s where the story is.”

So far, the boys don’t see a dark side to that narrative — just a chance to burnish their own stars and stay up late on school nights. “Oh, look. Here comes Blaine. Late again,” Austin said on a stakeout at Mr. Chow’s, the popular Beverly Hills restaurant, as he noticed his pal’s arrival. “Oh, and there’s stupid Josh.”

Josh Dempsey, 15, recently took Austin’s place at Pint Size Paparazzi and now shoots videos for the Web site. Austin greeted him with a couple of slugs on the arm.

“I swear, I hate that guy,” Josh told Blaine.

Blaine tucked a few strands of shaggy blond hair under his Dodgers cap and changed the subject.

“I shot Jaime Pressly today,” Blaine said.

“It was the worst picture ever,” Austin taunted.

“It was not bad,” he said.

“No, it wasn’t bad,” Austin conceded. Just then he spotted a familiar car and sprinted to catch up with it. But this S.U.V. wasn’t being driven by a starlet: It was his dad, arriving to pick him up.

Austin wouldn’t say where he was going, only that he was off to shoot “an exclusive” of the actress Drew Barrymore. Would he be joining up with his friends later that night?

“Yeah,” Austin said.

“No,” his father said before driving off. “He’s going to bed.”