I was inspired to do this photo of my son.

This was appropriately shot on the “Going to the Sun” road, above waterfalls and snowy peaks, sprinkled around Glacier National Park.

I get email all the time and I hardly ever look at it all because it is just physically impossible. As of today, there are over 17,700 unreads in my Flickr box and countless more buried in Facebook, MySpace, Gmail, etc etc. But every now and then I see an interesting subject that I click on.

This one is probably gonna make you cry, so get ready… no two ways about it.

Tom Aellis emailed me and told me just a little bit – enough to make me go spend some time exploring his story. He has been diagnosed with MS, and he wanted one lasting photograph of him with his son. Tom apparently reads Stuck in Customs as well as several others, including the blog of Joe McNally, who recently wrote a book called “The Moment it Clicks”. Tom emailed McNally to tell him about the situation, and McNally is such a class act that he mustered his crew and went out to Tom’s home for a special photo shoot.

The following is from Tom:

Now, after three years of being a warrior fighting MS, I was losing. This was impossible for me to accept, as I have a 12 year old son to raise and teach all the things that he needs to know about being a good man. I want to show him how to treat people fairly , how to have passion for what he chooses (no matter what it is) and most of all, how to have kindness in his heart.

I’ll gladly link over to Joe’s blog so you can read the whole story for yourself and see the results.

So, Tom has inspired this shot below and probably tens of thousands of other dads out there this weekend that are going to be doing the same thing. Even though you do not see me in the picture with Ethan, I am in the picture with him.