Photographers know countless methods to add interest to to their images through tricks of light, angle, color and more. One of the oldest ones in the book is to double the image with a reflection - to create a kind of mirror image of the original within the same frame. A well-planned reflection can display perfect symmetry or a uniquely distorted one that can be captured only a single time before it shimmers away.
Bridges over water are a favorite subject of photographers. Caught at just the right angle and in the right light, a bridge over its reflection in the water can create a new shape reflective of the old but with an entirely altered range of colors and tones - a kind of darkened mirrored copy of the original.
If you let your eyes relax, these reflections seem to create a whole new picture where the original image and its mirror image in the water become one. When you see these pictures as one whole rather than two halves, it feels almost as if you’re stepping into a new world.
Man-made objects like buildings and even entire cities have their own unique beauty when pictured with their reflections. The hard lines and sharp spires are softened and made to look more organic in the water-borne reflections.
Reflections are often used by photographers to imply mass of a building because they do, in effect, make the building appear twice as big. However, they can also be used to project a sense of regality or even a sense of magic or mysticism.
Sometimes, it’s not the items being reflected that’s spectacular - it’s the surface the reflections are bouncing off of. In the two images above, surrounding objects are reflected in shiny surfaces to create extraordinary new images. In the skyscraper image, the building seems to almost blend in with the sky due to the reflected clouds on its mirrored facade.
