Well, this isn’t a new find, and Miss Hayashi-san is getting a lot of exposure around the net, but I still thought I would repost it. There are several blogs that explain her process a lot better, but i’ll provide the summarized version: Its simple really, this young girl jumps off the ground at the right timing giving the illusion of her levitation. She sometimes takes hundreds of photos to get the right shot. An excerpt taken from Geekologie.com states:

“The only way to get a right timing for a shot is jumping a lot,” Hayashi said in an interview with the U.K.’s Daily Mail, dispelling our hopeful illusions that she’s the first human being who can actually fly. “Sometimes I need to jump over 100 times to get a right shot” She does this in front of her camera, mounted on a tripod, and continues to do so until she achieves that perfect, natural-looking “levitation.”

“I got the idea from an English idiom that says ‘to have one’s feet firmly planted on the ground,” she continued. “In Japan, we have the exact same idiom. But I am not a practical person at all. Therefore, I try not to have my feet firmly on the ground’ in my self-portrait photos to show my true self.”

You can visit Natsumi Hayashi’s official website here: http://yowayowacamera.com