Any kind of reflec­tion usu­ally makes pic­tures more inter­est­ing. But flip­ping a pic­ture upside down may also be a good attention-​grabber.

First of all, it takes time for your brain to pro­cess the image, fig­ure out what’s going on and why things are slightly odd, why we are not fully at ease when look­ing at the pic­ture. This takes a couple of seconds or so. It’s only then that we start actu­ally dis­cov­er­ing things in the image, like the per­son on the bot­tom right, or the cute little waves from the fall­ing rain drops.

Although one should always strive to make a pic­ture as eas­ily “decod­able” as pos­sible — that is a clear sub­ject, simple, organ­ised struc­tures and col­ours, all in a some­what logical com­pos­i­tion — doing the exact oppos­ite may also cre­ate some inter­est­ing pic­tures. Here’s a thought: The fact that you have to “fight” a bit with the image until you get through it may just be enough to get some extra atten­tion, so that ulti­mately the viewer spends a bit more time with it to dis­cover what it has to offer, instead of just skip­ping to the next image…