Fake 188 (not)

I included the photograph above, from Poland, at reference 2; one of a set of at least half a dozen or so similar images, seemingly produced with outdoor advertising posters in mind. A bit later, I started to wonder how it was done.

Did the photographer actually assemble the still life and photograph it, as suggested by the snap from his website above? Although if he did, the lighting must have been a bit tricky, with light appearing to come from at least two different directions.

I had thought that he might have pasted a photograph of a bottle on top of as photograph of an old master painting. Perhaps a painting from the same shop as produced that at reference 3, lifted from Hampton Court Palace? No longer.

Also that he might have pasted a photograph of a bottle on top of a photograph lifted from some image library, without much interest in its provenance. No longer.

Zooming in on the picture on my (HP Envy) laptop suggests that there is something different about the bottle, which retains its detail better than the background.

Zooming in some more, I get some boundary effects around the bottle, but who knows whether they are in the image or an artefact of my display? 

I next try Google Images, which finds the original fast enough. It also turns up the people at reference 4, who offer a whole portfolio of high resolution images of this general type, although mostly not as complicated.

Zooming here one gets much the same story. But with the difference that one can zoom in much further. And that the bottle (left) starts to pixelate while the background remains smooth, suggestive to me of vector graphics somewhere along the production line leading to my pixelated HP display.

The name 'vecteezy' is clearly suggestive of vector graphics, with this complicated can of worms being opened up at reference 5.

So for the present, despite the evidence of set design, the behaviour of the bottle part of the image suggests to me that the bottle was added afterwards and that the opening image is a fake to that extent.

PS: it turns out that I was quite wrong. The photographer - Bartek Sadowski - tells me that it was a single shot photograph, albeit with a little minor touching up. Photographic cunning yes, but fake certainly not.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/12/fake-187.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/04/trolley-812.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/texture-nets.html.

Reference 4: https://www.vecteezy.com/.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics.

Group search key: fakesk.