It’s an unusual situation to be sure: Major Stephanie Kelsen is one of a very few female fighter pilots. And now she’s pregnant. So, she hooked up with a photographer, Shlomit Levy Bard, who specializes in pregnancy. Along with some of the standard photos of mother, father and child, we also get photos that induce a severe case of cognitive dissonance — like the pregnant Kelsen in a flight suit.

The process is described on a New York Times blog:

Not a lot of active duty fighter pilots become pregnant, so this was new territory. “All she knew,” Bard writes, “was that flying fighters while pregnant, and while breastfeeding, was impossible, due to the G-force that the flying would exert on her body. Beyond that, she planned to see how she felt about motherhood and whether she felt she should return to flying after her son was born.” Photographer and subject agreed they wanted the photographs to include ones of Kelsen in her flight suit. “It still fit,” Bard says, “but just couldn’t be zipped up all the way. I also wanted to incorporate the sky, to give a feeling of the vastness that she experiences while flying, and to make sure that the environment would enhance the images, rather than compete for attention.”