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O'Rear credits that combination of camera and film for the success of the image. He stopped somewhere near the Napa– Sonoma county line and pulled off the road to set his 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. "There it was! My God, the grass is perfect! It's green! The sun is out there's some clouds," he remembered thinking.
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Driving along the Sonoma Highway ( California State Route 12 and 121) he saw the hill, free of the vineyards that normally covered the area they had been pulled out a few years earlier following a phylloxera infestation. 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. He was working with Irwin on a book about the wine country. 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. In January 1996, former National Geographic photographer Charles O'Rear was on his way from his home in St.
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Microsoft chose the image because "it illustrates the experiences Microsoft strives to provide customers (freedom, possibility, calmness, warmth, etc.)." ĭue to the market success of Windows XP, over the next decade it was claimed to be the most viewed photograph in the world during that time. The image also became part of Microsoft's $200 million advertising campaign to promote their software, Yes You Can and has been the subject of many parodies. The image would eventually be chosen as the default wallpaper, resulting in the company acquiring the image and renaming it to Bliss. Two years following the acquisition, Microsoft's design team selected images to be used as wallpapers in Windows XP. Westlight would be bought by Corbis in 1998, who digitized its best selling images. He sold it to Westlight for use as a stock photo titled Bucolic Green Hills.
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While it was widely believed later that the image was manipulated or even created with software such as Adobe Photoshop, O'Rear says it never was. It truly was Winter, at last for the adventurous crew, but it certainly gives us pause when deciding whether or not to seek out the origin of Ascent and Azul in our spare time.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. Eventually, the journey led them to a rarely traveled path in the city of Burlington, where the old Harris Homestead quietly sat behind a vigilant row of bare trees surrounded by glistening white snow. To Campbellville, Ontario, Canada they headed, in desperate need to visit the orangey area so burned into their memories, and thanks to the purportedly mysterious workings of a co-worker, they even landed the shooter's name. After what seemed like months of running into brick walls, an email to Bill Gates himself resulted in an apparently automated response that belted out nothing more but the snapshot's place of origin, which incited fits of jovial celebration office-wide. Eventually, his entire team was onboard in a furious (albeit seemingly futile) search to discover precisely where this image was shot, once leading to thoughts of permanent relocation if the locale was finally unearthed. Expecting the task to be one of relative ease in the age of email, meta tags, and digital archives, he began by questioning the usual suspects about its humble beginnings, but to his dismay, was turned down time and time again by rights protectors who wouldn't divulge the author nor location of such a highly prized stock photograph.
Although Autumn may not be most people's default background in Windows XP, it's still well regarded, and for one Vanity Fair writer, it sparked a worldwide quest to find its origin. It's no secret that people have been fascinated, or at least intrigued, by wallpapers and screensavers since the desktop first graced their eyes, and judging by the sheer multitude of websites and man-hours devoted to perfecting the screen that you so rarely see once you launch that first app, it's also no shock to hear a tale of such obsession.
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