Tom Anderson, the guy who's arguably most recognizable from a postage stamp-sized photo on Myspace, has transformed into a landscape photographer, ABC News reported on Sept. 9.
Tom, everyone's first friend on Myspace (and a co-founder of the social network), has been spending the past few years of his life shooting National Geographic-style landscapes that are posted to his Instagram account, @MySpaceTom, and the results are impressive.
"I was very happy with my results from the beginning," Anderson told ABC News. "That's highly unusual for me."
His journey into photography began at Burning Man 2011. At the dusty and notoriously hard-to-photograph festival, Anderson began making frames that were good enough to inspire him to continue shooting. He told the photography blog PetaPixel in 2012 that he was "kind of blown away" by the quality of the images he was shooting. He had joined friend and photographer Trey Ratcliff at the festival, to whom he now credits his quick development as a photographer.
But though he co-founded one of the most popular beginning social media websites, he admits to having diverse interests and passions throughout his life.
"If you knew me before Myspace, you'd probably thought I'd have been a scholar teaching philosophy in a university my whole life. If you met me before college, you'd probably have thought I'd be a musician for my entire life," Anderson said. "I like change."
News Corp. bought Myspace for $580 million in 2005, and in 2009 Anderson left the advisory role he had maintained after the sale, Bustle reported. Stocked with the windfall from the News Corp. sale, he kept busy, making a cameo appearance in an Adam Sandler movie and aiming to develop a baseball team in Las Vegas that ultimately never advanced beyond Anderson's drawing board.
Though his photos bring out the natural beauty of the places he visits, he described waiting patiently for the right composition and lighting. He explained part of his aesthetic does come from processing the images afterward.
"The less the camera is able to capture what you're seeing in a scene, the more editing it needs," Anderson said. "I'm not necessarily trying to represent nature exactly. I'm trying to make something beautiful like a painter would."
