Did BP Fake Its 'Crisis Center' with Photoshop?

[Seanr]

Did BP Fake Its 'Crisis Center' with Photoshop?

BP's response to the months-long oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has taken two forms: Fixing the oil leak and fixing the company's public relations crisis. BP's "crisis center" in Houston would seem to do both, with BP releasing photos to give the impression that the crisis center is working hard and with Pentagon-level technology to responsibly address the spill. But what if the "crisis center" photos are fake? Liberal blogger John Aravosis of AMERICAblog has uncovered some very convincing evidence that BP's crisis center photos were produced using the photo editing software Photoshop. Here's the original photo:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/image...photoshop8.jpg

Aravosis zooms in on seven different sections of the photo, showing evidence at each section that the photo was tinkered with. It appears that both the crisis center responders and the images on the display screen were pasted onto the photo. Here's just one of Aravosis' damning zooms. Click through for all seven:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/image...photoshop3.jpg

Coordinating with his commenters, Aravosis writes, "an astute reader noticed that the meta info for the photo says it was created in 2001, not July 16, 2010 as claimed on BP's site. It looks like BP took a photo from 2001, and in order to make it look like the command center in July of 2010, they pasted pictures of the oil well leaking over the old photo." The photos were later removed from BP's website. The Washington Post's Steven Mufson picks up the story from there.
Scott Dean, a spokesman for BP, said that there was nothing sinister in the photo alteration and provided the original unaltered version. He said that a photographer working for the company had inserted the three images in spots where the video screens were blank.
"Normally we only use Photoshop for the typical purposes of color correction and cropping," Dean said in an e-mail. "In this case they copied and pasted three ROV screen images in the original photo over three screens that were not running video feeds at the time."
However, as Aravosis points out, a professional photographer wouldn't be this unskilled in photoshop, and the "original unaltered version" still includes the people who were apparently artificially added onto the image. He quips, "I guess if you're doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center. Why do they need a fake photo at all? Don't they have a real crisis response center they could have used?"

lol bp

[BerenTebogo]

Lol.

[Cleverness]

Definitely a photoshop. I can tell from some of the pixels and having seen many shops in my time.

[Krandor]

That is some downright awful shooping. Haven't these people ever seen the magnetic lasso?

[Seanr]

why would they even have a crisis center that looked like that before the big spill? just lol bp...lol

[Seanr]

here is another...jesus christ bp

Spoiler: show

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_1xQeOPE9eP...ll_houston.jpg

BP fakes another oil spill photo, this time of 'top kill' exercise
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_1xQeOPE9eP...newfakebp1.jpghttp://2.bp.blogspot.com/_1xQeOPE9eP...newfakebp2.jpg


It's starting to look like Capricorn One over at BP. In addition to a photo of the oil spill crisis command center that BP faked on their Web site, an astute reader found yet another photo of the crisis response that has been faked by BP. This one is of the "top kill" effort to stop the spill a month or so ago. Above and below are parts of the photo that show that BP, yet again, inserted a fake screen behind its employees to make them look busier, or something.

[Kaylia]

These bad photoshop don't bother me. It's probably people from the marketting department that are shitting these bad pictures instead of doing something equally stupid. I don't think the engineering team is sitting on their ass doing nothing.

[Demosthenes11]

I think this is more a commentary on the public that we need pictures of an epic command room worthy of wing commander in order to feel like bp is making an adequate response

[OWS_Tonx]

lol fucking dumbasses. Shit is funny.

[Kaylia]

I think this is more a commentary on the public that we need pictures of an epic command room worthy of wing commander in order to feel like bp is making an adequate response

Truth is, they probably do. Most physics/engineering labs look like something that come straight from the 70, and no one would take them seriously.

[miokomioko]

And it worked, until some people had to go zooming in on shit!

[miokomioko]

Actually, now that I looked closely at the pictures, the 2nd one, isn't necessarily faked at all. They made a (VERY SHITTY) selection of the projected screen and darkened it by a lot so you could at least see that something was actually being projected and it wasn't just a big blown-out white wall. The terrible selection that was made just happened to overlap those two dopes' fat heads and darkened them too (along with some slivers on the two sides). That's not necessarily a "shoop," it's just really bad post work.

I don't know what to say about the first one, to be honest. Looks like they just tried too hard to make it look like a movie's global defense HQ. It could be somewhat legitimate, just with more bullshit added. I would hold it up to the standards of that shooped Korean (?) photo of the missle launch.

[Heavencloud]

http://www.threadbombing.com/data/me...px-Shopped.jpg

[Tekki]

Ya know... there really isn't a point at all to this story. At the end of the day it doesn't add or take anything away from the big picture. Its just so lol that if I saw a BP head i could only smile, laugh, and move on.

srsly though, lolBP

[Shenrien]

fucking awesome haha.

[Djghost454]

Are they playing sims or something on the laptop in the second pic?

[miokomioko]

It appears to be a Powerpoint on BP Business Marketing.

[Lucavi]

It appears to be a Powerpoint on BP Business Marketing.

So, Mafia Wars?

[Mizango]

I think this is more a commentary on the public that we need pictures of an epic command room worthy of wing commander in order to feel like bp is making an adequate response

Sad but true.

[Dantrag]

I think this is more a commentary on the public that we need pictures of an epic command room worthy of wing commander in order to feel like bp is making an adequate response

I miss the old wing commander games I wish someone would come out with a good reboot of them ;/