In photos: When people go to the heights of danger for a 'cool' selfie.
The fan base for Wu Yongning's extreme rooftop selfies and videos ran close to a million.
Photograph: Wu Yongning/Weibo.
Wu Yongning had amassed a fan base that ran close to a million on social media with his extreme 'rooftopping' selfies. And that is what ended up causing his death.
He was only 26.
The Chinese rooftop climber plunged from 62-storey Huayuan Hua Centre in Changsha, China, during one of his high-rise stunts in November -- a stunt for which he had been offered 100,000 yuan ($20,000) in prize money. But his death was only discovered this month after a after a Weibo user, who identified herself as Wu's girlfriend posted about the incident.
Rooftopping and other high-risk selfie fads have been widely condemned by law enforcement agencies around the world, but that hasn't stopped people from going to extreme lengths for a selfie.
Scroll down to see how people all over the world court danger for a selfie.
Alain Robert, aka a French urban climber, has been doing free solo climbing for decades, but even he stops to take a selfie these days.
Photograph: @frenchspiderman/Facebook.
Keow Wee Loong is a Malaysian daredevil photographer.
He went viral last year for shooting photographs in radioactive Fukushima without protective gear.
Photograph: @kiwikeow/Instagram.
Angela Nikolau scales horrifying heights to get the world's great cities as her backdrop.
Check out her risky selfies.
Photograph: @angela_nikolau/Instagram.
Rooftopping is not limited to the daredevils of the social media generations.
A player takes a rooftop selfie with her team mates before a football tournament in Rio de Janeiro.
Photograph: Sergio Moraes/Reuters.
The selfie phenomenon has seen people stop to pose for one even in the most dangerous situations -- like this Palestinian protester during clashes with Israeli troops near the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Photograph: Mohamad Torokman/Reuters.
A competitor uses a selfie stick in the middle of the FIS Snowboarding and Freestyle Skiing World Championships in Spain.
Photograph: Albert Gea/Reuters.
How could a mere sandstorm hope to stop the selfie brigade in China?
Photograph: Reuters.
This selfie taker couldn't be bothered by the high winds that swept through Beirut, Lebanon, during a storm.
Photograph: Mohamed Azakir/Reuters.
This man not only climbed to the top of a Moscow skyscraper during the Moscow-Ukraine crisis of 2014 to attach a Ukrainian flag to its spire, but also stopped to take a selfie.
Photograph: Ilya Varlamov/Reuters.
Even professional rescuers are not immune to extreme selfies!
This member of Chinese rescue team stopped to take one during an operation to rescue victims trapped inside a collapsed hotel after the 2015 earthquake in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Photograph: Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters.
