Bliss Wallpaper Download

[Oreo Huppe]

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]

Bliss, originally known as Bucolic Green Hills, is the default wallpaper of Windows XP, fully bought from Corbis by Microsoft for use as XP's main branding image. It depicts a green hill in Sonoma County, California, USA, just after the rain had went off. It was taken by Charles O'Rear in January 1996 while visiting his girlfriend. O'Rear also took XP's Red moon desert wallpaper, along with Highway Winding Through Countryside, which was used in an MSN Explorer 7 demo.

With Bliss being the default wallpaper of Windows XP and the subject of many memes, it is easily the most well known Windows wallpaper of all time, and it has been seen by millions of people all over the world. It also appears on a card in cards.dll, where it is cropped to just the clouds. Several edits have been produced over the years, as well as shots of green hills inspired by this one.

Photographer Charles O'Rear was visiting his girlfriend Daphne Irwin in January 1996. He stopped by the side of Sonoma Highway (California State Route 12 and 121) to take a few pictures of the hills with his Mamiya RZ67 medium-format camera, including the picture that would become Bliss. During this time the hill appeared to be greener than usual as a storm had just passed and there had been other frequent winter rains. Along with that, the vineyards had been removed from the field sometime years earlier due to a phylloxera infection; both factors combined made it the perfect opportunity for him to take a memorable, dream-like photo.

He would submit it to the Westlight stock photo agency (which he co-founded with Craig Aurness, who took the XP Beta sample picture Surfer) under the name of Bucolic Green Hills (with an ID of 71810), along with a vertical variant (ID of 71811). In 1998, Bill Gates-owned Corbis would buy Westlight, incorporating their photos into their evergrowing stock photo library. Corbis scanned best-selling images and added them to the online database,[1] meaning several companies have licensed Bliss in the past, although there are not many known examples of its previous usage.

Rob Girling, the design manager of Windows XP, carried out user research, and found that there was a common preference for landscape wallpapers. Jen Shetterly was the product design lead of XP, and was involved with curating and naming the wallpapers; she advocated for Microsoft to use Bliss as the default wallpaper, as an evolution to Windows 95's clouds branding motif. Incidentally, it also fits the color scheme of the default Luna visual style.

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