She's just a cosmic girl

"What I've imagined about the eclipse could not rival what I saw with my own eyes," Ye reminisces. "I want to show people the beauty and power of the nature through my photos."

A philosophy that would explain why she resigned from her job at a Singapore-based advertising agency to become a full-time "star-chaser."

Since substituting the rat-race for the space chase, Ye has spent half of her time on the road, camping on uninhabited mountains and down in remote valleys, waiting for the perfect moment to open the lens.

As her stature in night-sky photography circles has grown, so has the weight of her fridge door. She has developed a habit of buying a local fridge magnet every time she arrives in a new place and, now, dozens of them－some in the shape of African sculptures and others that are simply the name of their origin－litter the front of the appliance in her living room, which has become an evolving atlas of her celestial pursuit as she crisscrosses the globe.

"Chasing stars sounds romantic, but it's really not," She admits. "You will have probably slept in a field full of cow dung, and been subject of the various creatures' curiosity in the meantime."

Sometimes, Ye can be so focused on capturing a suitably dazzling tableau of stars, that she becomes oblivious to all else, including surrounding peril and her own health.

During a trip to Namtso, a lake in Tibet, she felt pain in her chest and could hardly breathe. A local first-aid station diagnosed her with early emphysema and warned her of the disastrous consequences if she was not treated in time. Despite such episodes, however, Ye does not consider her work to be dangerous.

"The media sometimes exaggerates the dangers, especially after they learn that I am a female photographer in my 20s," Ye says.

"Maybe what I am doing is dangerous. What I am doing is just a little bit out of the ordinary," she observes, "but I don't want to be labeled by my gender or age."

Explaining the reason behind her adventurous choices, she recalls an incident that took place at Yellowstone National Park in the US last year.

While Ye and her colleagues were on a shoot, unloading equipment and getting everything set up, a deer appeared, stared at them for a moment and then disappeared just like it was never there to begin with.

"At that moment it looked at us like human beings, and when I went to look, it had already gone," she remembers. "Then the idea occurred to me that, except for self-expression, photography is also an important way to record a fleeting moment.

"I would like to spare no effort in recording the fleeting beauty of the sky."