BP Photoshopped Fake Crisis Command Center for Website (Pics)

Copied from reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/crjx8/bp_photoshop...):

"Um guys, devil's advocate here, but I do a lot of photography. You know what happens when you take a photo of a room with a TV or a computer in it? If you expose the room correctly, the screens will be completely washed out. If you expose the screen correctly, you rest of the room will be completely black. You can't do both unless you turn the brightness of the screen down all the way, and even then it's a stretch. To compensate, you can take two photos, one with the properly exposed screen, and one with the properly exposed room, and merge them together (basically creating an HDR version). If you're decent at photoshop, it's not a big deal. But if you suck at it, you get results like this photo. I'm just saying, it's possible that they legitimately were not trying to hide anything this time."

This is like complaining about the brand of paint on the managements multi-million dollar yachts.

I would think the news about them dumping hundreds of barrels of left over chemicals down the well to use them up and get rid of them despite environmental law much more important.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07...

    One witness described how BP mixed a large quantity of   
    two chemicals and injected them into the well to flush out drilling mud. But the chemicals aren't usually mixed together, and the injection of more than 400 barrels of dense, gray fluid were about double the quantity normally used for the task, said Leo Lindner, a drilling fluid specialist for contractor M-I Swaco. 

    The reason for the action: 
    BP had hundreds of barrels of the two chemicals 
    on hand and needed to dispose of it, Lindner testified. 

    By first flushing it into the well, the company could 
    take advantage of an exemption in an environmental law
    that otherwise would have prohibited the discharge 
    of the hazardous waste into the gulf, he said.

It was modified.

First: http://imgur.com/701sS.jpg

Second: http://imgur.com/VEuaM.jpg

It looks like they thought there wasn't enough "stuff" on the screens. The second verson has more blank monitors/dead monitors.

In the first version they duplicated monitors [1,1] to [1,4] : [1,2] to [2,3] and part of [2,4] to [2,3]. They also darkened the room.

So if this picture is (mostly) real, like some of the comments suggest: Is it common practice to view video feeds in excel? I don't say it's not possible, I just imagine that it wouldn't be stable or practical.

Unfortunately, the first thing that came to my mind is that there exists a market for image compositing software that does a better job at obscuring manipulations like this.

It's a hard and evil problem, though. Not sure what the greater deterrence is though.

You'd think that if BP had spent as much time mitigating potential future risks as they have spent dealing with PR fallout, the whole Deepwater Horizon fiasco would never have happened.

I think this says a lot about the culture of the organisation.

They are prepared to present 'an altered reality' as truth. If you apply this throughout the company, what else do they alter and claim to be real. I would say a lot.