There’s a superhero in everyone.
Photographer Benjamin Von Wong wanted to capture the bravery and fearlessness of superheroes without the use of a green screen or cheap special effects and so he recruited a group of everyday people, dressed them up as famous comic characters and placed them on the edge of a 1,000 foot skyscraper in San Francisco.
“Every child has dreamed of being a superhero,” he says. “It’s a fantasy we’ve all had at some point. We imagine ourselves standing on the edge of a building, overlooking the city, hair blowing in the wind.”
“As we get older, we stop dreaming. We stop believing that anything is possible because we’ve seen too much of what isn’t. And that is why I wanted to photograph ordinary people as superheroes — so that they could see themselves as they had once dreamed,” said Van Wong on his website.
Similar to his project of turning ordinary people into superstar athletes for his epic gym shoot, Von Wong picked a group of employees from SmugMug as his subjects.
“These weren’t professional stuntmen,” the photographer says. “Just dads, engineers and customer service people.”
The models were forced to face their fear of heights by standing on the edge of a skyscraper in strong winds with only a safety cable protecting them from falling to their certain demise. After persuading each model to inch closer and closer to the 1,000-foot drop, Von Wong took photographs of them with a Nikon D800E and 14-24mm lens positioned directly above them looking down.
Here are the resulting photos that he captured:
Check out when went down during the photo shoot in the video below:
via Petapixel
