The landscape on every desktop

Bliss, Charl es O’Rear , 1998

In 2002, an image showing a partially sunlit hillside and a blue sky was chosen by Microsoft as the default wallpaper for its new Windows XP operating system. The image evoked a sense of calm and well-being, but seemed too good to be true, as if partially or totally created in Photoshop.

It was, however, a real landscape in the wine-making region of Napa Valley, California, photographed by Charles O’Rear in 1998. It was selected from the Corbis picture library by Microsoft’s software engineers, who named it ‘Bliss’. Apart from making the hillside a more vivid shade of green, the Windows XP wallpaper image was little different to O’Rear’s original.

As the default image on an operating system installed on over a billion computers, ‘Bliss’ is one of the world’s most familiar pictures. O’Rear has never revealed how much he was paid, but it’s thought to be one of the highest fees ever paid for the copyright of a single photograph.

Innovations and advances

The Ritz Dakota Digital, which went on sale in 2003, was the first singleuse digital camera. It was sold in the USA for $10.99. However, hackers quickly worked out how to adapt the camera’s firmware and software to make it reusable, and so the Ritz Dakota was withdrawn from sale.

The Epson R-D1, introduced in 2004, was the first digital rangefinder camera and the first digital mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera. It used Leica M-Mount lenses, but was also capable of using earlier screw-mount lenses with an adaptor.

And it was goodbye to… Agfa consumer film and photographic products, which ended production in 2004. This view of Napa Valley in California became known to millions as the default desktop pattern on Windows XP