Many viewers thought the image was computer-generated when it debuted in 2001 as wallpaper for Microsoft’s XP operating system. The green of the rolling hill and the bright blue of the Sonoma County sky looked too saturated to be true. Millions have seen it but probably never imagined it was real. So there'."ĭuring his career, which spans 36 years, O'Rear has been a staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times, worked for National Geographic magazine, and was part of Environmental Protection Agency's DOCUMERICA project.In January 1998, photographer Charles O’Rear was driving from his home in Napa Valley to his girlfriend’s house north of San Francisco when he stopped to take a photograph.
It was taken near my home north of San Francisco and it wasn't photoshopped at all. Some engineers thought it had been photoshopped, while others thought it had been taken near Seattle, where Microsoft's headquarters were based at the time, he said. O'Rear said even some engineers at Microsoft thought the image had been drastically altered. Microsoft did, however, make a few minor changes to it, such as cropping the Bliss image on the left side of the frame and altering the colour of the hillside to make it a much more vivid green. "A lot of people ask was it a digital manipulation? no," O'Rear said. I had no idea that it was going to become the most seen photograph or recognisable photograph in the world for how long? 10 years, 12 years?"Īs for whether the photograph was digitally manipulated, or photoshopped? So Microsoft then said through Corbis 'Here's a plane ticket, bring us that image and hand it to us, it's too valuable'. and they said how much they would insure that photograph for and I said 'Well I don't think that's enough'. "Corbis said, 'Please send us that original'. When Microsoft found the image through Corbis, because it had been scanned into its archives at a low resolution, the agency flew O'Rear to their headquarters to get a better scan. One major reason for starting the agency was Gates' belief that people would someday decorate their homes with a revolving display of digital artwork using digital frames, according to the New York Times. Microsoft later discovered it thanks to a stock photography agency he uploaded it to that Microsoft founder Bill Gates decided to form in 1989, called Corbis. "Here were a few white clouds remaining and out goes the camera and there is the photograph. On the particular day he was driving to see his then girlfriend in January, 1996, a storm had just passed through and he got out his medium-format Mamiya RZ67 camera. Today the hills are home to a vineyard and it's unsafe to stop where he did to take a photograph of the hills. O'Rear is in Australia this week care of Microsoft to promote the fact that support and security updates are ending for XP.Īlthough he didn't reveal exactly how much he was paid for the photo, he did reveal how it was taken and responded to accusations it was digitally altered.ĭespite many thinking the photograph, named "Bliss", was taken in Ireland, O'Rear actually captured it whilst driving through Napa and Sonoma counties in California on the side of the highway on his way to see his then girlfriend and now wife. If all 1 billion purchased a copy of XP (they didn't) - and Microsoft paid O'Rear 1 cent per copy sold - he would've made $10 million. Technology commentators recently estimated that O'Rear's photograph, which Microsoft chose in 2001 as the default wallpaper for its XP operating system, had been viewed by no less than 1 billion people. "It was a flat 'here's what we're paying you, thank you very much and let's get it on the screen and get moving'".
"It was not a royalty type of situation," O'Rear added. "If I had known how popular it would become and how many computers it would've been on I should've negotiated a deal and said, 'Just give me a fraction of a cent for every time it's seen' and that would've been a nice arrangement," O'Rear said.