Perhaps nowhere else in the world are photographers as much a part of the spectacle as they are at Cannes Film Festival. Huddled shoulder to shoulder in black tuxedos, they don’t just document the glamor of Cannes — they help create it.

Hollywood freelance photographer Matthew Baron recently told Reuters in a video how he personally tries to get a shot of a well-known celebrity looking straight down the barrel of his lens.

“I’m able to balance the camera on one hand, able to hold it, and underneath I’m able to point at the lens,” Baron says of his trick. “Some of the talent thinks it’s weird and funny, and they wave back, or they point back, so it makes for an interesting shot sometimes.”

But Baron says that his quirky technique doesn’t always work, and he has to resort to what most people know the photographers for: shouting at the stars.

“I’m yelling their names, my veins are popping from my neck, a vein forms in my forehead, I can’t scream anymore, and I still don’t get the eye contact,” he laments.

Baron explains he is in the coveted first section of Cannes Film Festival and the actors and actresses come straight up to his area. But he only has a very short time to get his shot.

“I have to lock eyes with the leading lady and I have to beg, beg with my eyes, beg like I’m a silent film star, and plead with them to do a solo fashion shot,” he says.

“And that’s the currency because sometimes they do it once and they don’t do it again. Sometimes you get it, and sometimes you don’t. And when you get it, it’s the purest joy in the world. When you don’t get it, you want to go home.”

Last year, Denzel Washington got into a heated exchange with a photographer on the red carpet at Cannes after the photographer reached out and grabbed him. Washington scolded him for it.

At this year’s festival, a documentary titled AVEDON premiered about famed photographer Richard Avedon. There was also a controversial embrace of AI images in Steven Soderbergh’s film John Lennon: The Last Interview.

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