The quality could be better but you can’t say the above image is not pretty unique. It’s a dashing long exposure night image of the Barrie, Ontario waterfront with the glass like waters of Kempenfelt Bay on Lake Simcoe reflecting the emerging skyline.

The thing is, this image is a fraud. It is an image of the Barrie downtown skyline but what is supposed to be the waters of Kempenfelt Bay are actually a duplicate of the downtown, inverted and blurred a bit to simulate a water reflection.

I’ve seen the effect many times before but never bothered to try it myself. However, I came across the technique in an article a few days ago and decided to give it a go. The article gave instructions for the latest version of Photoshop so, having just an ancient version of Photoshop Elements on my outdated laptop, I had to improvise.

So, this is the backwards way I did it – I cropped the original photo so that there was a straight line “shoreline”. I then made a copy of that image. In Photoshop Elements, I took the copy, and inverted it via Image>Rotate>Flip Vertical. Then, I created a blank image, large enough to fit both images. Both copies needed to opened together, along with the blank image. Both copies were then made into background layers of the blank image. Then, it was just a matter of connecting the two images together, doing any necessary cropping, flattening the layers and saving the final product.

Oh, you can keep the reflection image clear and crisp or you can blur it a bit via Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. The article I read suggested going as high as six pixels. I thought that was way too blurry so, I believe, this image was at three.

You see, not an ounce of Lake Simcoe is showing in the above image. You could take a city skyline in the middle of the prairies and create a waterfront image with this simple technique. Simple, yet outside the box far enough that many wouldn’t even think to give it a try.

The original image is one of a series of night images that we published at It’s About Travelling a few weeks ago. Check those out here: Barrie Ontario Night Photos.