Bliss

Bliss is the default computer wallpaper of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. It is a virtually unedited photograph of a green hill and blue sky with clouds in the Los Carneros American Viticultural Area of California's Wine Country. Charles O'Rear took the photo in 1996 and Microsoft bought the rights in 2000. It is estimated that billions of people have seen the picture, possibly making it the most viewed photograph in history.
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. While it was widely believed later that the image was digitally manipulated or even created with software such as Adobe Photoshop, O'Rear says it never was. He sold it to Westlight for use as a stock photo titled Bucolic Green Hills. Westlight would be bought by Corbis in 1998, who digitized its best selling images. Two years following the acquisition, Microsoft's design team selected images to be used as wallpapers in Windows XP. The image would eventually be chosen as the default wallpaper, resulting in the company acquiring the image and renaming it to Bliss.

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