A Melbourne man who targeted schoolgirls when he hid a camera in a shopping basket to film up the skirts of supermarket customers has been spared jail.
Paul John Breitkreuz, 28, captured 22 films of the unsuspecting girls then uploaded the images online to swap among a child pornography network.
When police raided his Keysborough home they found 304 child porn images, with victims aged as young as 12 months, and two videos, which had been emailed from other group members.
Victorian County Court Judge Jane Patrick told Breitkreuz his images represented real children being abused.
"Clearly your offending is serious," she said.
Ms Patrick also said she was concerned his crimes had escalated from viewing child porn to "thrill seeking" by capturing the images himself.
"You've gone out to capture images for your own sexual gratification," she said.
But Ms Patrick said Breitkreuz had good prospects of rehabilitation if he continued the counselling and therapy he began after his arrest last November.
Prosecutors called for Breitkreuz to be jailed, saying his upskirting crimes were aggravated by the fact he had targeted schoolgirls aged about 12 to 14.
"He's focused on children, girls in school uniform," prosecutor Josh Robins told Breitkreuz's plea hearing last month.
One picture Breitkreuz uploaded to the internet was accompanied by a caption that read: "I snapped a 12/13 year old."
He asked others in the child porn network "how am I going?".
Breitkreuz pleaded guilty to accessing child porn, three counts of upskirting and four counts of distributing images of a person's genitals between July and October 2012.
His barrister David Gibson had previously told the court Breitkreuz was remorseful and deeply ashamed of his crimes.
He said the recent birth of his daughter had underscored to Breitkreuz "the evil of the material".
But Ms Patrick said the appalling nature of his crimes should have been evident.
"It should not have required the birth of your daughter to understand how wrong the capture and distribution of these images was."
She sentenced Breitkreuz to two community correction orders which require him to undergo treatment programs and complete a total of 240 hours of community work.
He will be required to report under the sex offenders register for eight years.
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