Levitating Girl Natsumi Hayashi: 'The trick is jumping right' (PHOTOS)

Japanese girl Natsumi Hayashi has become a levitating sensation. Her astounding levitation photographs have gone viral on the Internet, she has landed fame and stardom and is being featured by media outlets. She has also displayed a far less known face of the art (or magic) of levitation.

Hayashi, the wonder girl from Tokyo, is not a magician, nor a spiritualist. She doesn’t follow ancient spiritual practices unique to Asia.

Hayashi's success, and difference, lies in the fact that she makes her floating photos look quite natural in terms of expression and pose. I wanted to express myself in the picture as someone free from Earth's gravitational pull, Hayashi has said.

She perfected the craft of jumping with finesse and shooting her jumping sequences with even more perfection to create the illusion of levitation, or floating without being hindered by the forces of gravity.

The gravity-defying fete is indeed the result of extreme hard work, passion and dedication. At least in her case, levitation is not the result of mediation or any other ancient spiritual attribute.

Sometimes I need to jump more than 300 times to get the perfect shot, said Hayashi.

After shooting her levitation pictures painstakingly with an SLR camera with high shutter-speed, she started posting them on her blog Yowa Yowa Camera Woman Diary.

She is a trained photography professional who mastered her art working as an artist’s assistant for two years. Her levitation is the result of her inexhaustible practice of jumping perfectly to achieve stillness of pose as well as that of her commendable photography skill.
In plain speak, she is indeed not flying in the air as levitation enthusiasts dream about, nor is she photoshopping her images.

“The only way to get a right timing for a shot is jumping a lot. Sometimes I need to jump over 100 times to get a right shot,” she told Daily Mail.

According to Levitation.org., levitation is a phenomenon of psychokinesis (PK) in which objects, people, and animals are lifted into the air without any visibly physical means and float or fly about.

There are two methods to levitate, it says. The first is to attempt to REALLY levitate... generally you sit cross-legged and meditate and this causes you to levitate (supposedly). The second method is to create the illusion that you are levitating.

In isolated areas of Asia there are apparently many accounts of this phenomena taking place, the site says.

However, science has a different take on levitation although scientists have reportedly found a way to levitate small objects. U.S. scientists have found a way to levitate the very smallest objects using the strange forces of quantum mechanics, and said on Wednesday they might use it to help make tiny nanotechnology machines, Reuters reported in 2009.

The scientists said they had detected and measured a force that comes into play at the molecular level using certain combinations of molecules that repel one another, according to Reuters.

In 2007, there was as Telegraph report that Physicists had 'solved' the mystery of levitation. The British newspaper had reported that the University of St Andrews team has created an 'incredible levitation effects’ by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together.

Though it is possible to levitate objects as big as humans, scientists are a long way off developing the technology for such feats, the report quoted a scientist as saying.