Your Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman

by Morgan Kazanjian

What do you do when Spiderman sneaks up on you in your office? For Tom Epperson, the answer was simple: photograph him. His 4-year-old son, Dylan, was spending the day fighting crime, and Tom knew it was a photo-op that he couldn’t pass up. The result was fun, captivating images which Tom shared on his blog. While the images are a deviation from Tom’s usual style, he believes that creating personal work helps him grow as a photographer.

If you are always shooting somebody else’s ideas you never grow and only stagnate. Not everything I shoot is going to blow the socks off of someone but that is not the point. It is the process of being creative that is important and to keep myself grounded and thinking before I press the shutter.

Since it was a spontaneous shoot, Tom didn’t have to do much other than let Dylan be a 4-year-old.

My son was in his element and all I had to do was press the shutter. The poses were for the most part all his. It’s pretty difficult telling him how to pose so I let him do his own thing.

So far everyone is loving the images (who wouldn’t?!), and it has led Tom to consider documenting Dylan as much as his free time will allow. It also taught him some key lessons:

[Don’t] be a control freak, have fun and be in the moment. We as adults can get so wrapped up in our daily activities we forget that we too were kids, and in their world it’s all about having fun.

Fun is definitely the word for it. To read Tom’s accompanying narration with the images, check out his blog. For more work, look at his website.

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