It's a classic scene in every comic book or superhero movie. The hero stands atop the roof of a giant skyscraper to face off with some bad guy or look out over the city he or she is devoted to protecting.
However, photographer Benjamin Von Wong just turned this scene from fantasy into reality. He transformed everyday people into basically superheroes, and he's got the photos to prove it.
Von Wong partnered with photo website platform SmugMug to turn the company's employees into super crime-fighters — and some crime-makers — literally on the edge of glory. Dressed as Wolverine, the Hulk and Harley Quinn, members of the SmugMug team posed atop a skyscraper more than 40 stories high in San Francisco's financial district, and the results are truly breathtaking.
While these photos look like screen grabs of movies with loads of CGI, they're not. Yup, those are actual people actually standing 1,000 feet above San Francisco.
However, Von Wong points out on his website that you should not attempt to do this same sort of thing yourself. He is a trained stunt person, and the models wore safety equipment as they seemed to dangle dangerously close to the edge of the building. You can see this in the behind-the-scenes video of the photo shoot below.
"As we get older, we stop dreaming. We stop believing that anything is possible because we've seen too much of what isn't," Von Wong wrote on his website about the project. "That is why I wanted to photograph ordinary people as superheroes—- so that they could see themselves as they had once dreamed."
This is the second part of Von Wong's Ordinary People Transformed Series as part of SmugMug's Artist-in-Residence program. Part one featured black-and-white photos of regular people participating in athletic activities and generally looking badass without using any Photoshop.
Check out the rest of the photos in Von Wong's superhero series below.
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