After more than 12 years, Microsoft’s Windows XP operation system has retired on Tuesday, April 8. But, the most famous image of the blue sky, rolling pasture and fluffy white clouds that adorned millions of computer screens for so long, will be etched in people’s minds forever.
Aptly titled as “Bliss,” the iconic picture dates back to the year 1996, when the photographer Charles O’Rear, took a drive through California’s highway north of San Francisco to see his then-girlfriend Daphne.
O’Rear said “While driving this winding little, what I call a country road, there was, my God, the grass is perfect, it’s green. The sun is out. There are some clouds. I kind of think that, may be it wasn’t just perfect as what I made it in the photograph. It could have been no clouds. And by the time I parked, by the time I set my camera, the clouds might have come in, because everything changed so quickly at that point. So, now I get the camera ready and here come the clouds and I make a frame, and I crank to the next one.”
O’Rear claims the pic’s secret not just to be a perfect hill on the perfect time of the year with a perfect sky, but the Fuji Film with more brilliant colors combined with lens in the legendary Mamiya RZ67 camera, to have made the difference.
He further said “when it’s on the film its, what you see is what you got.” He thinks Bliss wouldn’t have been the same, if he had made the photo with a 35mm SLR.
Now 73, O’Rear says that he had no idea that this pic was going to become the most recognizable photograph in the world. “A lot of people ask was it a digital manipulation? No,” O’Rear said.
While submitting it to Corbis, the stock photo and image licensing service founded by Bill Gates in 1989, the original frame of Bliss was completely unaltered and unedited. “Bliss” was purchased by Microsoft for an undisclosed sum and O’Rear still doesn’t know how Microsoft found the photo.
Microsoft’s Windows XP is dead officially, but “Bliss” is going to be recognized forever. Even after decades, somewhere a photograph like Bliss pops out, people will say “I remember that. When we had computers on our desk, this was on the screen.”
