World Map Windows Wallpaper

[Lutgarda Briseno]

Blissoriginally titled Bucolic Green Hills, is the default wallpaper of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. It is an unedited photograph of a green hill and blue sky with white clouds in the Los Carneros American Viticultural Area of Wine Country, California. Charles O'Rear took the photo in January 1996 and Microsoft bought the rights in 2000. It is estimated that billions of people have seen the picture, possibly making it the most viewed photograph in history.[1]

Former National Geographic photographer Charles O'Rear, a resident of the nearby Napa Valley, took the photo on film with a medium-format Mamiya RZ67 camera while on his way to visit his girlfriend in 1996. While it was widely believed later that the image was manipulated or even created with software such as Adobe Photoshop, O'Rear says it was not.[2][3] He sold it to Westlight for use as a stock photo titled Bucolic Green Hills.[4] Westlight was bought by Corbis in 1998, who digitized its best selling images.[5] Two years following the acquisition, Microsoft's design team selected images to be used as wallpapers in Windows XP. The image would eventually be chosen as the default wallpaper, resulting in the company acquiring the image and renaming it to Bliss.

Microsoft chose the image because "it illustrates the experiences Microsoft strives to provide customers (freedom, possibility, calmness, warmth, etc.)."[7]Due to the market success of Windows XP,[6][8][9] over the next decade it was claimed to be the most viewed photograph in the world during that time.[1]

In January 1996, former National Geographic photographer O'Rear was on his way from his home in St. Helena, California, in the Napa Valley north of San Francisco, to visit his girlfriend, Daphne Irwin (whom he later married), in the city, as he did every Friday afternoon. He was working with Irwin on a book about the wine country. He was particularly alert for a photo opportunity that day, since a storm had just passed over and other recent winter rains had left the area especially green.[10]

To take the photo, O'Rear used a Mamiya RZ67 medium-format camera on a tripod, choosing Fujifilm's Velvia, a film often used among nature photographers and known to saturate some colors.[2][13] O'Rear credits that combination of camera and film for the success of the image. "It made the difference and, I think, helped the Bliss photograph stand out even more," he said. "I think that if I had shot it with 35 mm, it would not have nearly the same effect."[14] While he was setting up his camera, he said it was possible that the clouds in the picture came in. "Everything was changing so quickly at that time."

Since it was not pertinent to the wine-country book, O'Rear made it available through Westlight (transferred to Corbis after its acquisition) as a stock photo, available for use by any interested party willing to pay an appropriate licensing fee.[2] He also submitted a vertical shot, which was available at the same time.[16]

In 2000, Microsoft's Windows XP development team contacted O'Rear through Corbis, which he believes they used instead of larger competitor Getty Images, also based in Seattle, because the former company was owned by Microsoft founder Bill Gates.[17] "I have no idea what [they] were looking for," he recalls. "Were they looking for an image that was peaceful? Were they looking for an image that had no tension?"[18] Another image of O'Rear's titled Full Moon over Red Dunes, known as Red moon desert in Windows XP, was also considered as the default wallpaper, but was changed due to testers comparing it to buttocks.[19]

Microsoft said they wanted not just to license the image for use as XP's default wallpaper, but to buy all the rights to it. They offered O'Rear what he says is the second-largest payment ever made to a photographer for a single image; however, he signed a confidentiality agreement and cannot disclose the exact amount.[20] It has been reported to be "in the low six figures."[1] O'Rear needed to send Microsoft the original film and sign the paperwork; however, when couriers and delivery services became aware of the value of the shipment, they declined since it was higher than their insurance would cover. Instead, the software company bought O'Rear a plane ticket and he personally delivered it to their offices.[1] "I had no idea where it was going to go," he said. "I don't think the engineers or anybody at Microsoft had any idea it would have the success it's had."[21]

Microsoft gave the photo its current name, and made it a key part of its marketing campaign for XP. Although it is often said that it was cropped slightly to the left and the greens were made slightly stronger, the version Microsoft bought from Corbis had been cropped like this to begin with,[16] while the saturation is a result of the Velvia film. O'Rear estimates that the image has been seen on a billion computers worldwide, based on the number of copies of XP sold since then.[20]

In November 2006, Goldin+Senneby visited the site in Sonoma Valley where the Bliss image was taken, re-photographing the same view now full of grapevines. Their work After Microsoft[11] was first shown in the exhibition "Paris was Yesterday" at the gallery La Vitrine in April 2007.[22] It was later exhibited at 300m in Gothenburg.[23]

O'Rear concedes that despite all the other photographs he took for National Geographic, he will probably be remembered most for Bliss.[20] "Anybody now from age 15 on for the rest of their life will remember this photograph," he said in 2014.[24]

Since the origins of the image were not widely known for several years after XP's release, there had been considerable speculation about where the landscape was. Some guesses have included locations in Ireland, France, England, Scotland, Switzerland, the North Otago region of New Zealand, southeastern Washington[20] and the south of Tbingen, Germany.[25]Dutch users believed the photograph was shot in Ireland's County Kerry since the image was named "Ireland" in the Dutch release of the software; similarly, the image was named "Alentejo" in the Portuguese version, leading users speaking that language to believe it had been taken in the eponymous region of Portugal.[15]

Other users have speculated that the image was not of a real location, that the sky came from a separate image and was spliced together with the hill. O'Rear is adamant that, other than Corbis' minor alterations to the digitized version, he did nothing to it in a darkroom, contrasting it with Adams' Monolith:

I didn't "create" this. I just happened to be there at the right moment and documented it. If you are Ansel Adams and you take a particular picture of Half Dome and want the light a certain way, you manipulate the light. He was famous for going into the darkroom and burning and dodging. Well, this is none of that.[20]

In 2012, David Clark of the British magazine Amateur Photographer commented on Bliss's aesthetic qualities. "Critics might argue that the image is bland and lacks a point of interest, while supporters would say that its evocation of a bright, clear day in a beautiful landscape is itself the subject", he wrote. He notes the "dreamlike quality" created by the filtered sunlight on the hillside as distinguishing the image. "What made Microsoft choose the image above all others?" he asked. Although the company had never told O'Rear or anyone else, Clark thought he could guess. "It's attractive, easy on the eye and doesn't detract from other items that might be on the screen are all contributing factors. It may also have been chosen because it's an unusually inviting image of a verdant landscape and one that promotes a sense of wellbeing in desk-bound computer users."[27]

Windows 7 is an operating system released by Microsoft in 2009. It is the successor of Windows Vista. Unlike Vista which was widely criticized for its performance, 7 was more positively received and widely adopted. It was followed by Windows 8 in 2012.

For Windows 7's wallpapers, Microsoft licensed rights-managed images from Getty Images and Corbis, as with previous versions. Images were also licensed from other sources, such as SIME/4Corners Images, Photolibrary, and individual photographers' PhotoShelters. While Windows 7 continues the tradition of using photography, two new themes consisting of illustrations were added, to give Windows 7 "a little bit of personality" according to Steven Sinofsky. The illustrators were found through the agency 72 and Sunny.[1] They also worked with photographer Will Austin, who directly assisted Microsoft with selecting six wallpapers from his stock collection, as it wanted to incorporate photos from Seattle in Windows 7's themes, the city where its headquarters are located in.[2][3] Austin described Windows 7's wallpapers as "a great example of Microsoft's commitment to the user experience".

While Windows Vista included a small set of 16:10 widescreen wallpapers, this is the first Windows version where all of the wallpapers are 1920x1200, as widescreen displays were more widespread by 2009. It is also the first version where the wallpapers are included as part of themes; while Vista's wallpapers were split into categories, 7 sorts the wallpapers by themes instead, where selecting the theme will have the corresponding set of wallpapers being used as a slideshow.

The default wallpaper is Harmony, created by Chuck Anderson and Erik Attkisson. Whereas Windows XP and Vista Starter editions have unique wallpaper sets, Windows 7 only has one wallpaper for its Starter edition, which is an edited version of the default wallpaper seen in other editions.

Windows 7 features regional themes for 20 countries, similar to Windows XP Starter Edition featuring 3-6 wallpapers for each country. The team behind these themes licensed images from a wide range of stock photo agencies, including Getty Images, Corbis, SIME/4Corners Images, Masterfile, age fotostock, and JupiterImages (which was acquired by Getty during Windows 7's development). Jennifer Shepherd, who produced the regional themes, also hosted a worldwide photo contest where Microsoft employees worldwide were able to submit photos that represent their country. Employees of each country voted on the best wallpapers for their theme, including both stock photos and winning images from the contest.[4] These themes aren't implemented as part of a language pack, but rather manually added to the OS image (e.g. a user performed a clean installation with the image in the English language and if they install the Korean language pack later, they won't get the regional themes as if they performed a clean installation from the Korean language's image).

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