It was the later part of a warm and breezy afternoon in the spring of 2002 when I first saw this image. My parents were in the middle of setting up our brand new Desktop PC after our old Gateway computer finally shut down. After spending all morning of fumbling with the instructions, littering the office room with Styrofoam and cardboard boxes, setting up our Ethernet cable, our cutting-edge flat-screen monitor, twin speakers, and a gigantic CPU tower to the side of our monitor, our brand new PC was fully operational. Along with the computer we purchased from the now defunct CompUSA came a installation package for this fairly new operating system of Microsoft at the time called Windows XP that was quickly gaining storm.
When we loaded the installation disk in the hard drive, a loud startup sound echoed throughout my house and the Windows XP logo was shown against a dark screen with a loading bar with three blue squares moving across the gauge. After setting up who the administrator and users were, which might I add took another 10 to 20 minutes, a wallpaper of rolling hills soon greeted the desktop screen. In that moment, I was really captivated that the desktop could do something so amazing as to load an actual picture rather than the solid turquoise colored background that I have become accustomed to in Windows 98. My 2nd grade imagination tried to wrap my head around what might lie behind those rolling hills and the clear sky. Towards the right of the hill you can make out a mountain or hill in the faraway distance. Could this be a hint that a small town was beyond this hill? A stream? Or perhaps a farm?
This image, which I later come to find out was named Bliss, would be the hallmark of my adventure in learning how to develop PC and computer skills. Bliss, which used to be one of the most recognizable images in the world was taken by former National Geographic photographer, Charles O' Rear in 1996, making the image over 20 years old. The picture was taken in the lush vineyards of the Los Carneros Viticultural area of Sonoma County, California. Charles, who lived in Napa, California at the time, took the photo of these hills while on his way to visit his girlfriend (who he later married). The green hills, which were once full of grape vines, was cleared following a pest infestation. O'Rear got the idea of taking some photos given the weather and the clean image of the hill.
O'Rear then put the image on Corbis, a popular stock photo hosting website that was owned by Bill Gates (but has now closed and whose content is being distributed by Getty Images). In 2000, Microsoft contacted O'Rear and wanted to purchase the rights to his image. While O'Rear signed a non-disclosure agreement and cannot say the exact amount that Microsoft paid him, it is said to be the second highest amount ever paid for a single image.
Bliss is quite a remarkable image because contrary to popular belief, the image that you saw on your Windows XP system remains unedited. The image was not put through the edits of Adobe Photoshop or other editing program. What you see is straight from the lens of the camera. I was a bit skeptical at first, but in an interview with Charles O'Rear, he says that the image was unedited, but was slightly cropped to the left to fit the desktop dimensions. O'Rear is shocked at how widespread the whole image is, citing that he has seen it on people's computers in Newsrooms and in the background of TV shows, movies, and all across the globe.
If one was to visit the spot where the photo was taken today, he or she might find the landscape unrecognizable due to the amount of grape vines that now populate the area. Below is an attempt to recreate the photo in 2009.
Looks pretty different right?
Even though the Windows XP line is long obsolete, that image of Bliss still brings an air of nostalgia to my childhood. I will always associate the image of the rolling hills and crisp blue sky to the time-span of being immersed in learning how to use a computer. No matter when I think back to browsing the web using Internet Explorer, playing flash games, or even learning how to type up my first book report instead of writing it on paper, I always think back to this image and how it has been burned into my mind.
