They didn't set out to create an online hit that would sweep the globe in less than a year.
They just wanted to get away from the stress of life and have a little fun for a day.
A year ago February, friends Sarah Branigan, Lily Christon, Erin Johnson and Paula Ogston left Richmond for the relative calm of Virginia Beach.
What they did - and the pictures that proved it - went from goofy fun to random hit to an Internet phenomenon called www.jumpbecause.com.
It was nothing extraordinary or planned. They just took pictures of themselves jumping. There was no fancy equipment - just four friends snapping pictures of one another with their feet off the ground.
"We were just kind of goofing around, and we started taking pictures," said Ogston, like Christon, a graduate student in psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. "We thought it was funny, so we kept doing it. It was a really fun day for us. We were all stressed out."
Branigan, the administrative director of art education at VCU, later posted some of the pictures on Flickr, a photo-sharing Web site.
Someone at National Public Radio saw one of the pictures - an extraordinary coincidence, considering Flickr estimates users upload more than 5,000 photos per minute - and interviewed Branigan for a story that aired in early May.
The fun of their little taste of celebrity led the friends to create a Web site to post more of their jump pictures and to tell the stories behind the shots.
People started noticing.
In less than a year, the site has grown to include pictures from across the world.
It's a true no-profit, with the friends putting in the money and the time to keep it going. They have ideas about using it as a fundraising tool, but nothing is in place yet. The only certainty right now is that people around the world love the idea.
Click on Turkey, and you'll see Frank from Germany airborne in Alanya.
Click on Indonesia, and you'll see Paulo in Bali, surfboard in hand, jumping into the ocean.
Click on Kentucky, and you'll see Allison and Jenny jumping for Barack Obama in downtown Lexington.
A list of jump locations on the home page includes more than 100 places.
The jump founders know few of the people who have submitted pictures. The images just started showing up in the e-mail.
"That kind of blows my mind," said Branigan.
"It's pretty exciting," said Ogston.
Ogston jokingly takes credit. Before taking off for a summer tour of Budapest, Prague, Vienna and parts unknown in Croatia, she said she told her friends, "I'm going to spread it in Europe."
She passed out fliers in the hostels where she stayed, but she's just as amazed as Branigan about the reach.
"We didn't expect it to happen so organically," she said. "A lot of the pictures are coming from areas where we don't have much contact."
Branigan so liked the idea, she used it as an assignment in the 2-D art class she teaches at VCU. The 15 students in her class had to stage and photograph jumps for a cause.
"It teaches location, composition, timing, all the usual art stuff," she said. "Plus it involves a good dose of community activism."
She's more inclined to pursue a fluid approach to art - "I'm more, let's just see what happens," she said - but has enjoyed watching her students figure out how to create and capture a moment with meaning.
"I like the ones with stories," she said last month outside her office on VCU's Monroe Park campus, showing off enlargements of the pictures her students took. "I like the ones that just happened."
More than a year after that trip to the beach, the friends are still friends, and they still like taking pictures of people jumping.
"It doesn't get old for us," said Ogston. "It's kind of a nice distraction from what we're doing."
Contact Zachary Reid at (804) 775-8179 or zreid@timesdispatch.com.
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