Of course, I knew it would be impossible to get Paris Hilton, Victoria Beckham or Cheryl Cole to fill out a survey of what they did at the weekend.

But because celebrity status hinges on reporting in the media and a visual documentation of their lives, there was another way to attain information about how stars act compared to everyone else: by looking at the thousands of pictures taken of them as they go about their lives.

Getty Images is the most comprehensive photographic agency in the world. By looking at the caption information accompanying Getty photos  -  who was in the picture, and when and where it was taken  -  I was able to work out a few basic principles about the makings of a celebrity.

The first has to do with geography  -  stars need to show up in key locations. By studying Getty photos over 12 months, my colleague Gilad Ravid and I found that 80 per cent of more than 600,000 images were taken in just three places: London, Los Angeles and New York.

And within these cities, photographs were taken in just a few neighbourhoods. Take Los Angeles, for example: it's a city measuring 500 square miles, yet nearly all the photographs were taken on a narrow corridor along Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards

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