Charles O’Rear, a resident of the nearby Napa Valley, took the photo on film with a medium-format Mamiya RZ67 camera in 1996. Microsoft bought the rights to the image in 2000 and used it as the default wallpaper in Windows XP for the next 10 years.
About Bliss (image) in brief
Bliss is the default computer wallpaper of Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system. It is a virtually unedited photograph of a green hill and blue sky with clouds in California’s Wine Country. Charles O’Rear, a resident of the nearby Napa Valley, took the photo on film with a medium-format Mamiya RZ67 camera in 1996. Microsoft bought the rights to the image in 2000 and used it as the default wallpaper in Windows XP for the next 10 years. It has been reported that billions of people have seen the picture, possibly making it the most viewed photograph in history. It was widely believed later that the image was digitally manipulated or even created with software such as Adobe Photoshop, but O’Rear says it never was. He sold it to Westlight for use as a stock photo titled Bucolic Green Hills, which was later digitized by Corbis, which is owned by Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Another image, Full Moon over Red Dunes, known as Red moon desert, was also considered as a default wallpaper, but was changed due to testers comparing it to buttocks. Microsoft said they wanted to buy all the image rights to use as XP’s default wallpaper but offered O’ Rear what he says is the second-largest payment ever made to a photographer for a single image. He signed a confidentiality agreement and cannot disclose the exact amount of the payment, but it is reported to be in the low six figures, or around $100,000. He said he had no idea where it was going to go, or where he was going, or even if it was even going to be delivered to their offices or where it would be delivered. He said it was possible that the clouds in the picture came in. They declined since it was higher than their insurance cover.
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This page is based on the article Bliss (image) published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 19, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
