I was going to say we’re now less than a decade in the past, since I first posted this in March of 2013, but then I checked the image details and it was taken in October 2012, so it’s still a bit over a decade old. I know you needed to know.
But what looks like a Photoshop trick, isn’t – this is as shot, and not even a multiple exposure, simply a fruit fly (genus Drosophila) on a mirror. The one showing its back is the real one, the rest reflections. But why so many? It’s because the reflective surface of the mirror is on the back side of the glass, but the front surface can also reflect to a lesser extent, even images coming from behind/within, and so we’re seeing repeated reflections bouncing around within the glass, reminiscent of those ‘infinity’ mirrors and using the same principle. These are more noticeable because the flash was aimed towards the fly and so the background (the rest of the bathroom) was dark.
We can see the bright spot reflection from the back of the fly, showing the direction of the flash, but the underside is also lit quite well, due to the proximity of the mirror.
The whole thing about reflections from each surface of the glass was a big issue in the earlier days of camera lenses, and produced a lot of ghosts and flares, but with better lens coatings and additives within the glass itself, these are kept to a minimum nowadays. Not so much with bathroom mirrors.
More amusing is the fact that, for the slow season, I recycled an image used for the slow season. This says something, but I’ll be damned if I know what…