These Landscapes Turned Upside Down Are a Brilliant Visual Trick

We love the elegance of these cityscapes and landscapes that have been flipped on their heads to create impossible scenery. Each image is really two photographs of the same place, one shot from the ground and one from the air, joined at the horizon so the sky becomes a second landscape hanging overhead. Originally designed for a United Airlines in Australia campaign, the ads used the tagline ‘Dreamers Welcome’ to announce the service of their 787 Dreamliner plane service.

From a surreal look down the Brooklyn Bridge leading to a vertical Central Park, to a paddle board down an impossible Colorado River, the scenes draw the eye in. Really fun work created by Cream Electric Art.

Surreal composite of the Brooklyn Bridge walkway leading into an upside down aerial view of Central Park and Manhattan, from the United Airlines Dreamers Welcome campaign Convertible driving down Route 66 beneath an inverted aerial view of a Los Angeles freeway interchange San Francisco cable car street scene with an aerial view of the city skyline hanging upside down above it Skier carving a track down a snowy slope beneath an inverted view of a mountain village and gondola Paddle boarder on turquoise water inside a red rock canyon that mirrors overhead like the Colorado River San Francisco street with cable car tracks rising into an inverted view of Lombard Street's hairpin turns

The campaign ran in Australia to announce United’s Boeing 787 Dreamliner routes to the US, and the six scenes are all American, from New York and Route 66 to San Francisco, ski country and the canyons of the Southwest. The retouching studio Cream Electric Art built each one from dozens of source photographs. For more mind-bending pictures, see Anton Repponen’s misplaced landmarks, the staircase illusion that fools your eyes, and Peeta’s optical illusion murals.