I’m always on the lookout for the “undiscovered worlds” that can be seen through puddles. But take a look at this photo:

Scene outside

Nice photo of a person walking in front of a window, eh?

But wait … above that, there’s an upside down tree. But the figure is right-side up.

Hmm. Interesting, eh?  This isn’t a fancy trick double-exposure, it’s just a regular photo I took over the weekend that has been cropped.

OK, well, it’s been both cropped and flipped, of course, just like most of my puddle photos are. But nothing has been added or subtracted to the photo. And it’s not a reflection in a puddle. Rather, I took the photo while standing inside a pedestrian tunnel here in Tübingen. What looks like a window is really a set of lights on the ceiling near the end of the tunnel. The person we see walking in front of the window is actually a reflection of a person in the light coverings walking across the end of the tunnel. The tree is outside the tunnel, but visible when you’re standing inside the tunnel.

You can click here to open the original photo in a new window for comparison with the flipped one above. The original one may look at the world as it really was; the other one shows how the world really is when we think to to look beyond the simple reflection.

I had thought it was necessary to have a puddle to find this phenomenon, but as it turns out, a puddle is not required.