BP Posted Altered Photo of Crisis Response

BP posted an altered photo on its website that showed more activity in its Houston crisis room than was actually taking place.

The picture BP put on its site during the weekend showed workers monitoring 10 giant video screens displaying underwater images related to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

It turns out three of the screens were blank, and a BP photographer used Photoshop software to doctor the pictures.

Blogger John Aravosis of Americablog revealed the tomfoolery. "I guess if you're doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center," he wrote.

BP spokesman Scott Dean says there’s no scandal at work: the photographer was simply showing off his Photoshop skills.

"Normally we only use Photoshop for the typical purposes of color correction and cropping," he told The Washington Post. "We've instructed our post-production team to refrain from doing this in the future."

One thing that’s not changing at BP is its dependence on deepwater drilling. To raise the $20 billion that BP pledged to put in escrow for claims related to the Gulf of Mexico disaster, BP suspended its dividend and agreed to sell $7 billion in assets to Apache Corp.

All the assets going to Apache are on land. BP doesn’t want to dump the deepwater projects, because huge amounts of oil are thought to be contained in them.