It is one of the most viewed photos of recent times but with Microsoft calling it curtains for XP, the default photo Bliss has been retired. suchayan mandal talks to the man behind the lens in an email interaction
This month is gloomy. While author Marquez breathed his last, there was another bad news. Microsoft has officially stopped all support for Microsoft XP. What makes Charles Chuck O’Rear more sad is the fact the photo he shot will never be an official "by default" wallpaper in Microsoft XP. The portrait of a rolling green hillside with white clouds and the sun pouring a magical hue on the terrain scores among the world’s most viewed pictures. And with XP expiring the picture, christened Microsoft XP Bliss, has also retired officially. But O'Rear, (73) “can’t get away from it”. Like the famous pug that featured in a mobile TV commercial, this picture has followed one everywhere. If one has even touched a desktop computer or paid a visit to any random computer spare shop anywhere in this globe, one just can't miss the blissfulness of the photo. Keeping the calmness intact, this picture, as opposed to general belief, is not at all photo-shopped, although a few years back, Microsoft did admit to darkening the hills.O’Rear had clicked the photo in 1998 on the Napa-Sonoma County line in California, using a hand held Mamiya RZ67 film camera. And it's not the tale of a photo freak journalist clicking photo on a lonely highway, rather it was a fable of love. “I was driving down Highway 121, on my way home from visiting my fiance, Daphne Larkin, in Marin,” wrote O’ Rear, who has grown up in Missouri. He was driving on the highway lined with vineyards, when he spotted an open field that wasn’t planted with vines. “It was a Friday in January, after a storm, the grass was green, and I thought ‘Oh my god! Look at that scene!' So, if it wasn’t for Daphne, I wouldn’t have that photo. How much better can the story be!”These days he is too busy, for the spotlight is on him and many are working on a documentary film of the picture. O’Rear, who got his pilot’s licence before his driving licence, was a photographer with National Geographic for 25 years. And he was the only photographer to ever appear on the cover. “That is if you don’t count Koko the gorilla, who was pictured with a photo she took of herself,” he wrote. Having clicked the calm and poised vision of nature, O’Rear had put the photo in a Stock Photo Library, which was owned by Bill Gates. The photo library had photos of about 100 other photographers. After some days, Microsoft called him up. “They were looking for a photo that would illustrate the philosophy of their new 2002 operating system and out of the thousands of photos in that stock library, they had chosen mine,” recollected O’Rear. The next hurdle popped up in delivering the photo to Microsoft. The company paid an amount in the low six figures for the photo, something which still amazes O’Rear. With the cost of the photo being enormous then, even “Fed Ex wouldn’t touch it,” he said. Eventually the deal was finalised. Microsoft paid for a plane ticket and he hand delivered the photo to their office in Seattle. After that success followed O’Rear.Though the world knows him by ‘Bliss’, O’Rear felt blessed for his 15,000 photos, which he had clicked for National Geographic, when he was in Indonesia. Images of 6,000 Muslims praying at a time and ghost-like images of school girls draped in white are his favourites. While Microsoft has planned to roll out a new default wallpaper image, O’Rear quipped, “ I am waiting for the phone to ring.”
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