BP’s (Photoshop) Command Center: Why the Fake Photo, Guys, Why?

Not going to speak to the doctoring, but even in the best case picture:

1. The engineers are in the dark.
2. They are strangely underequipped. Look at their desk. There’s nothing for them to manipulate. They aren’t at a bank of controls, rather, they could take notes on… paper.
3. They aren’t working collaboratively, with each other or with anyone else. There’s no active discussion, no turning to the neighbor to say “that, did you see that, there on the valve!”. They each sitting there, reviewing it for the thousandth time, thinking “I got nothing.”
4. No women, no outside minds pondering the problem. Just three privileged men, staring at the overwhelming problem they caused, with no energy or activity or way to fix it. It won’t cost them their way of life, or their livelihood, but at least they have to look at it.

Agree with Megan on all points.

Wanted to add that what’s strange is that any photographer and his BP media handlers would have had complete control over everything that was on the screen.

Why wasn’t THIS control of the room and it’s displays exercised? BP doesn’t have control over their own room for media propaganda purposes? Makes no sense.

…an amazingly bad PhotoShop job.

…my 7th grader laughed.

…just bizarre.

The best picture was the photoshop John A did of the BP monitors with the MST3K guys sitting in front. Just sayin’.

What lq said. When I went to view it, even knowing what I was going to see, I still laughed. It’s just perfect!

I just don’t see this as a big deal. No data is being dry-labbed or images enhanced/retouched, just an attempt to digitally “spiff up” a lab by copying screens to blank monitors. And the 3 “privileged males” are just a typical cross-section of engineers in any field, and not just geo- or petrochemical-engineering.

There’s plenty about BP to be outraged about but this isn’t one of them.

Have to disagree with you, Bill. It’s a lie. It’s not only a lie, but a useless lie. With more information being released each day indicating that BP (and the US gov) have been limiting information on seepage on the Gulf floor (and its impact) – a lie is very telling indeed – and a big deal. What people will begin to put together is that if BP can’t even be honest about something as inconsequential as this – where does it stop?

A lie isn’t ok – it is a big deal – and, in this context, it’s just dumb. It also indicates that they take the public for fools – which obviously isn’t far off the mark.

everyone has seen this by now, right?

http://gizmodo.com/5592975/bp-photoshops-another-official-image-again-terribly

it’s been removed from the PB site on the feature page, but still appears (in a now cropped version) on the scrolling images on their frontpage.

Nope, new to me. But far more damning IMO. The control room example is like “our viewgraph looks empty, let’s copy&paste that same plot that we used 3 slides back”. This new one says, “we don’t really have high-tech air capability in this area but let’s pretend that we do”. As opposed to AJ, I have trouble calling the first one lying, but the 2nd one is a true misrepresentation of capabilities for selfish gain. Practically nothing about the claimed narrative of the 2nd picture turns out to be true whereas only a fraction (which I believe is negligible) of reality is distorted in the 1st.

The first picture, that copies and pastes that same plot from three slides back, gives the impression that BP has more information and management capacity than it actually does. It pretends to have enough information to fill ten screens when can only fill seven.

It might be that seven is sufficient, but ten is definitely a misrepresentation of their capabilities.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/oil/7904221/BP-admits-it-Photoshopped-official-images-as-oil-spill-cut-and-paste-row-escalates.html

the link above is from a story in the UK Telegraph; it details BP’s admission of the faked images and links to their new set of Flickr, ‘altered images’. you can’t make this stuff up.

I see now where Megan and AJ are coming from. Technically speaking, the same “information”, in terms of ordered bits, is present in both the original and “doctored” screens, since the empty screens are repeated, something obvious to any observer. The “capacity” is also, technically speaking, the same, since there’s the same number of monitors in both images, which is where the corporate capital investment lies. The only real-world difference between reality and BP’s desired, contrived reality in a modern control room would be a few keystrokes or mouse clicks to duplicate those images to the blank screens. In other words, a good corporate photographer would have mentally composed his picture beforehand and said, “Those blank screens look low-tech. Fill them up with something high-tech” and an operator would have readily obliged with those few clicks before the shot was taken. (20 years ago, creating the same difference would have involved physically adding a $10 coax tee and cable, also a negligible change in corporate capacity.) So to someone familiar with the technology involved, the difference between the original and doctored control room image images appears to be innocent enough, hence my original comments. But what the comments here are proving is that the perception of a general audience, unfamiliar with modern control rooms, is totally different. The perception is that of misrepresenting knowledge, skills, and capabilities, which would justify the charge of lying. You can say BP is clueless for not appreciating the difference but I think it’s a charge that can be leveled at many companies today. On the other hand, it’s quite possible the same person made the changes in both the control room and helicopter images and himself didn’t see the huge technical difference between them.