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> Microsoft said they wanted not just to license the image for use as Windows 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
> "I don't think the engineers or anybody at Microsoft had any idea it would have the success it had
They also flew him out to deliver it. I feel like they had an idea of what they had.
I work in the refurb department of an e-waste recycling company. I take pictures of monitors and TVs showing Bliss, and I test printers with it. It has bright spots, dark spots, it's colorful, and has plenty of fine detail, making it a decent test picture. Bonus points for being familiar to most people.
Microsoft Design also released 4K renders of nostalgic wallpapers (including bliss) a few years ago. I can't find the original link but here's the reddit post with the pictures.
That accidental discovery post is a great read. The Sonoma hills around there have this quality where the light just looks implausibly perfect — we drove through once and kept pulling over thinking something was wrong with our eyes.
Back when Deep Learning wasn't just LLMs and diffusion models (approximately 5y ago), for my senior project at uni I did a image animation. In goes an image, out comes a short gif. It was trained via (reverse) optical flow.
I used this image for a demo how clouds move and the audience+professors all went WOOOW and that is now a core memory of mine
It appears MSFT never wanted to see the image used outside of Windows. Would be interesting to know if had been sold as a stock image by either Westlight or Corbis, and if so what the licensing terms were. Let's assume someone did pay for rights to use when it was available open stock. Did MSFT contact each purchaser and buy their rights ?? Not saying that happened. I have, though, purchased many images over the years via image sellers, and have seen many of those images pulled by the photographer. Called the stock agency to check, and yes my rights are "...in perpetuity".
Does anyone have any idea what RZ67 lens was used? People have found the exact hill and from this one might be able to figure out from what perspective it was captured, thus which focal length it was shot at. I haven't found anyone who has done this, only vague, unconvincing speculation. Maybe confounders like fact that it is now covered by a vineyard and erosion long since changed the shape of the hillsides makes this impossible.
Windows XP was released when I was in college, and I remember discussing this picture with my friends guessing where it could've been taken. Never thought about California back then, let alone moving there.
A little bit less than twenty years later, few years after moving to the US, my family and I were driving somewhere near Sonoma, CA, enjoying the views, and someone in the car said something like that this looks like that Windows background. Quick check with Google, and sure enough, we were less than a mile away. We didn't stop, but surely got some photos.
I’m a bit confused about the claim that the image was altered.
Sometimes skies look like that and grass looks like that and (the right) film is more than capable of capturing that with the appropriate saturation. Especially Velvia. Velvia is probably even cranking up the saturation, to levels you would not see like that with the naked eye.
Look at that first Tuscany image. The colors are a near perfect match. With the others the colors - especially the greens – can also be a lot more muted, however that seems to be down to darker greens as a starting point and also the light/weather (less saturation when it’s overcast and there is no direct light).
On close examination of the wallpaper (to a level of detail not visible on early 2000s screens) also shows all the hallmarks of a real photograph with remarkably little retouching.
On the left and especially the right you can see ugly clutter behind the hills which is only not distracting if you don’t examine the photo to closely. Anyone who photographs landscapes knows the issue of hard to hide clutter that nevertheless from my perspective also grounds the photograph in the real world.
Also clearly visible on the hills: tracks/paths through the hills. This is also something hard to avoid in landscape photography, though you try to minimize it with perspective. The same applies as to the clutter: my view is that this grounds the photograph as an actual photo.
Third hallmark of photography: the foreground grass is all out of focus! This is often hard to avoid. Techniques like focus stacking now exist, but as a single photograph that is often a trade off you have to make if your landscape shows both things close by and far away.
So, yeah, looks 100% like a real photograph and shows what a look Velvia is, mostly.
It was shot on Velvia slide film. Knowing that emulsion you either expose it just right and it looks gorgeous or you over/underexpose and the details are gone and can’t be brought back.
People don’t realize that there’s no such thing as an “unedited photo” because either you’re making decisions in the darkroom or the software/firmware is making decisions in the camera.
But doesn't that describe the original capture, not what happened during scanning and digitization? The allegations I've seen are mostly about post-scan color and saturation adjustments, not whether the exposure was correct on film. Velvia being unforgiving doesn't really close that question.
No clue if that exact image was altered, but I do a fair amount of road biking east of Napa and Sonoma, and on some days the sky and hills look just like the photo.
Microsoft bought all the right and even the original physical film (that I guess they would scan to get the best image possible). So I guess then Microsoft would be on it too.
I always thought it was a synthetic image. I expect many others did too.
On some level, they chose the real image that appeared to be a synthetic image.
I stumbled onto MSN for a story about Bears in a sanctuary who had overhead ropes (horizontally laid), and what a difference it had made.
Actually, I don't remember the story that well. What I do remember is that MSN story used a GEN AI image. Fake bears, fake rope. There, of course, are real photos available.
But MS want that automation, dont want to pay writers, or editors, and don't want to pay royalties or seek permission for photographs.
“Microsoft paid photographer Charles O’Rear a confidential amount for the Windows XP wallpaper “Bliss,” but it is widely reported to have been in the “low six figures,” meaning over $100,000.”
Charles should have asked for MS stock instead.
“In 2005, Facebook offered David Choe about $60,000 to paint murals at its office. Instead of cash, he chose Facebook stock. When Meta Platforms went public in 2012, his shares were estimated to be worth around $200 million.”
The wikipedia says Microsoft acquired full rights after Bill Gate's Corbis acquired the photographers company, so that is a complete forgery/hallucination?
The Wikipedia article seems to say the same as above:
> O'Rear made it available as a stock photo through Westlight, which was bought by Bill Gates' Corbis in May 1998.[36][43] The photograph was initially titled Bucolic Green Hills.[42][44] By the time of its acquisition, Westlight was estimated to have been one of the largest stock photo agencies in the United States. Corbis had previously hired O'Rear to photograph wine auctions in Burgundy in 1995,[45] and after the acquisition, they digitized Westlight's images.[36] Microsoft contacted O'Rear through Corbis in 2000, wanting to buy full rights to the photograph.[40]: 3:37, 3:50 [6] O'Rear had to personally deliver the film to Microsoft in Seattle due to delivery services declining because of its high value. The Napa Valley Register reported that O'Rear was paid "in the low six figures".[6][40]: 3:57 He had signed a confidentiality agreement and cannot disclose the exact amount.[2][46] Microsoft renamed the photograph to Bliss and chose it as the default wallpaper of Windows XP.[6][37]
Shot on a Mamiya RZ67 with Fuji Velvia 50 — that film stock's saturation is a big part of why the sky looks almost unreal. O'Rear has mentioned in interviews that he made zero color adjustments. The California winter light hitting those Sonoma County hills just looked like that.
