BP photoshops fake photo of crisis command center, posts on main BP site

UPDATE 12:08PM Eastern 7/20/10: BP has faked yet another oil crisis response photo on its Web site.

UPDATE: 11:14PM Eastern: BP has now posted the "original" photo, they claim. Except - surprise - they are refusing to post the high-resolution version of the new "original" photo (update: they've now posted the original photo). They posted the high-res version of the altered photo earlier, and in fact, that version is still live via a link below the new photo. Why not post the high-res version of the new "original" photo? Afraid someone is going to enlarge it and find out it's fake too?

UPDATE 10:37PM Eastern: The Washington Post has the story now. Oddly, BP is now claiming that the photo is real - but it showed blank screens, and rather than show blank screens at AP's crisis center, they instead put fake content-filled screens in the photo. Uh, a few questions.

1) Why were the screens in the crisis center blank in the middle of the crisis? Coffee break?

2) The BP spokesman claims that the photographer photoshopped the changes. Really? A professional photographer hired by BP Photoshops so poorly that a 12 year old kid could do a better job. Really? Let me show you what BP said exactly, and then the photo that supposedly this "professional" edited:

Now here is the Photoshop job that the "professional" photographer did - this is just one part of the photo that he screwed up:

3) Why does the meta data show that the photo was actually taken on March 6, 2001? Or is BP next going to tell us that their professional photographer has never set the time and date stamp on his multi-thousand dollar camera? Because then all of his photos for all of his clients will be screwed up. Really?

UPDATE: The photo contains data suggesting it was taken in 2001, not July of 2010 as claimed on BP's Web site. That would suggest, at least one possibility is, that BP took an old photo and Photoshopped new pictures of the oil spill over it, to make it look "new." More on this at the end of the post.

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?

Original BP Photo that is linked off of this page, with a snippet of the photo:

Note the bad Photoshop job on the parts I cropped and blew up - click on each photo to see the larger version, which makes it painfully clear that they faked the photo (poorly, at that):

UPDATE: BP has apologized for the Photoshopped version of its command center, and it has just released this new, unedited version.

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