Fake or fiddled?

joeseph wrote in post #18972390
Interested to know where the light is coming from that casts the shadow on the bannister knob...

My guess is that's the on-camera flash which would be just to the left of the viewfinder, therefore casting shadows slightly to the right in the background. Note the matching shadow just to the right of the woman in the far background.

In my early days of wedding work I used a flash bracket with the strobe mounted left of the lens. It would create those unsightly shadows all the time. I finally got a "flash-rotator" bracket" which centered the strobe directly above the lens and eliminated side shadows.

I see a little shadow here only but I think it is real and only one flash was used. Typical direct flash, flat and boring along with redeye. What I did notice was that lens sure had bad CA.

joeseph wrote in post #18972390
Interested to know where the light is coming from that casts the shadow on the bannister knob...

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It appears to be perfectly consistent with the other shadows that are found throughout the image. . Given that, I wonder why you are curious about it.

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I think that the shadows of objects in the room are irrelevant other than to compare them to the subjects. Think about the process of faking an image. The subjects are what is important so you'll take an image of the room and photoshop in one or more subjects to get the image you are looking to create. I have no doubt that if this an assembled image, an image of the room was taken and one or more images of the subject were taken, then assembled.

joeseph wrote in post #18972390
Interested to know where the light is coming from that casts the shadow on the bannister knob...

It's a copy of a snap is all we can find out about the original photo. The copy was a photograph of a photo made in 2011, unknown when the original photo was taken or what on. To me it looks like the results one gets with a Kodak Instamatic type film camera that had cube flash mounted on top. They were wide angle flashes.

The people are standing on a landing at the top of a flight of stairs. The shadow thrown by the bannister globe/knob orb type thingy is on a wall several feet away behind it, and the knob itself could obscure half the wide shadow letting the viewer see only the right of that shadow, in much the same way as the male is obscuring the shadow that must be on the wall behind him.

Don't forget also, the reflection from the window will add an apparent light source and the decor is predominantly white, so there is bounced flash all over the place.