reflections 245

recently i had a nice visit to Riga, the capitol city of Latvia. the city is famous for art nouveau architecture, especially in the area around Albert Street. it had been raining so there were puddles in the cobblestone street where i observed the reflection of the beautiful buildings. at first i focused on capturing nice reflections but when i viewed the images i noticed that the vertical reflections skewed the perception of the horizontal street, creating the illusion of height differences in the flat street

in this second shot it seems like there is a step between the levels of the cobblestones

in this third photo the puddle is close to the elevated sidewalk. the reflection of the building creates an illusion where the street on left side of the image seems to be going uphill at a considerable slope compared to the sidewalk