Reality?

Here is a photograph:



This will be running in the satire page of our newspaper in a few weeks. Is it Photoshopped and faked?

No really, what do you think? You don't have to know how photography works or what the technical telltale signs of Photoshopped fakeness are. If someone just showed you this photograph and asked you if it was something that actually happened or if the photograph was faked (let's say the guy on the right is an important faculty member like the head assistant to the dean of undergraduates at the university), well, what would you think?




The photograph above is real; the event it depicts actually happened.

If you're feeling strange about your understanding of photography as something accurate or as something not to be trusted, why?






EDIT: Here is the original file for comparison:

My goal, once I had opened the file on the computer, was to make the real photo look like it had been photoshopped together while not touching the compositional integrity of the original. Did this experiment work?