Bliss (photograph)

(pictured in 2007) is the photographer of Bliss. The photograph depicts a lush green rolling hill with cirrus clouds during a daytime sky, with mountains far in the background. He drove along the Sonoma Highway, California State Route 121 intersecting 12, when he noticed the hill, which had been cleared of vineyards after a phylloxera infestation years prior. O'Rear came to a stop in southern Sonoma County, near the Napa–Sonoma county line and pulled off the road. O'Rear recalled that he was alert for a photo opportunity the day he took the photograph, considering that a storm had passed over and winter rains left the hills green. "There it was! My God, the grass is perfect! It's green! The sun is out; there's some clouds," he remembered thinking. Despite being widely believed that the photograph was manipulated or created with software such as Adobe Photoshop, O'Rear said that he did not digitally enhance or manipulate the photograph in any way. == History ==

After creating the photograph, O'Rear made it available as a stock photo through Westlight, a photo agency he co-founded. Westlight was bought by Seattle-based Corbis (now BENlabs) in May 1998, who digitized its best-selling images. By the time of its acquisition, Westlight was estimated to have been one of the largest stock photo companies in the United States. The photograph was originally titled Bucolic Green Hills. In 2000, Microsoft's Windows XP development team contacted O'Rear through Corbis, "I have no idea what [they] were looking for," he recalled. "Were they looking for an image that was peaceful? Were they looking for an image that had no tension?" XP marketing also used photos of hills and clouds, but the Microsoft branding team "wanted an image with ‘more grounding’ than the images of skies they had used in Windows 95. Also, the green grass and the blue sky fit perfectly with the two main colors in the branding scheme." 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; however, he signed a confidentiality agreement and cannot disclose the exact amount. It has been reported to be "in the low six figures." the default graphical user interface of Windows XP. The image was used extensively by Microsoft for promoting Windows XP and their $200 million advertising campaign. Since the origins of Bliss were not widely known after the release of Windows XP, there had been considerable speculation about where the landscape was. Some guesses have included locations in France, Ireland, Switzerland, New Zealand, Germany, and southeast Washington. Dutch users believed the photograph was shot in Ireland since the image was named "Ireland" in the Dutch release of the software. O'Rear said that Microsoft also questioned him about the authenticity of the photograph several years after the release of Windows XP, with the developers saying that "most of us think it was Photoshopped." O'Rear is adamant that, other than Corbis' minor alterations to the digitized version, he did nothing to it in the darkroom, contrasting it with Ansel Adams' Monolith: == Reception ==

The photograph was positively received. In a journal, Pedagogical University of Kraków professor Marcin Kania referred to Bliss as "one of the most recognizable contemporary landscape photographs." Jacob Ridley of PC Gamer described Bliss as the "wallpaper that defines [all] Windows wallpapers," Writing for Sonoma Magazine, Meg McConahey added that a cult following emerged around the photograph. Shortly before Microsoft retired Windows XP in April 2014, news about the Bliss photograph escalated in popularity. == Legacy ==

Due to the market success of Windows XP over the next decade, while in July 2021, a modified version of the photograph was added to Microsoft Teams as a background. They wrote that the modified version "shifted the shadows, softened the clouds, and added some dandelions." Microsoft later released a 4K resolution rendering of the background on their Microsoft Design website in June 2023. A limited-edition holiday sweater featuring Bliss was made available by Microsoft in November 2023 at the Xbox Gear Shop. The sales of the sweater were donated to The Nature Conservancy to combat climate change. In August 2025, Microsoft released limited edition versions of Crocs featuring Bliss. O'Rear conceded that despite all the other photographs he took for National Geographic, he will probably be remembered most for Bliss. After the release of Windows 7 in 2009, O'Rear said that if asked, he would have provided more photographs to Microsoft. Re-creations in November 2006, then covered by a vineyard|alt=A hill covered with vineyards Before the photograph was bought by Microsoft in 2000, the hill returned to its previous state as a home to vineyards. Despite this, photographers have tried re-creating Bliss. The Goldin+Senneby duo visited the site in Sonoma Valley in November 2006, where Bliss was taken, re-photographing the same view now full of grapevines. The duo said that they were attracted to the Bliss location due to it being "a backdrop to our lives in the front of the screen, as a kind of collective subconscious." Their work was exhibited at the gallery La Vitrine in Paris in 2007. Art historian Julian Myers-Szupinska said that with the return of vineyards, the Goldin+Senneby Bliss re-creation "loses its shine." == See also ==