Ke's quest to produce one-of-a-kind selfies has taken her to many different places in the world. Photo provided to china daily.

An employee of Japanese camera maker Olympus, Ke interacts with professional photographers often and this inherently helped her gain a good eye for photography, as well as heightened her standards for the photos she takes. Early last year, she chanced upon several creative pictures in which a Japanese woman was photographed jumping and striking different poses in the streets of Tokyo.

“I was fascinated. The way her lithesome figure was captured really showed an overwhelming yearning for freedom,” Ke said.

That inspired Ke to come up with her own series of images, and she first attempted to do so with a camera and a tripod. She initially thought that all she had to do was perform a jump just before the camera’s shutters closed, but she soon realized that she could not get a satisfactory image even after a hundred leaps.

“Everything, from how high I jump to how I position my legs to how I flip my hair, needs to be taken into consideration. I usually don’t wear dark colored pants as they tend to make the lower part of my body invisible in the picture. I also like going barefoot as it better evokes this feeling of lightness,” said Ke, who is a mother to a 15-year-old boy.

The hardest part of the project, however, was overcoming the awkward feeling of knowing that someone was watching her perform her stunts.