What the famous Windows XP Bliss site looks like, today

Bliss is the name of the default computer wallpaper of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. It is an image of a rolling green hill and a blue sky with cumulus and cirrus clouds. The landscape depicted is in the Los Carneros American Viticultural Area of Sonoma County, California, United States.

Former National Geographic photographer Charles O'Rear, a resident of the nearby Napa Valley, took the photo on film with a medium-format 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 Corbis for use as a stock photo. Several years later, Microsoft engineers chose a digitized version of the image and licensed it from O'Rear.

Recreation by Goldin+Senneby of approximately the same location in November 2006, showing vines covering the area.

  "21st Century Bliss" by Tony Immoos (2010) reportedly "closely resembles the 1996 photograph"[14] but was taken about 14 years later from nearly the same spot.


Over the next decade it has been claimed to be the most viewed photograph in the world during that time.Since it was taken, the landscape in it has changed, with grapevines planted on the hill and field in the foreground, making O'Rear's image impossible to duplicate for the time being. That has not stopped other photographers from trying, and some of their attempts have been included in art exhibits.


How to find the site

Since then, the location of the “Bliss” photo has been disclosed: about here, on Highway 12 (overlapping with Hwy 121) in Sonoma County. If you’re driving from Napa to Sonoma, it’s little more than a mile or so past the magnificent Domaine Carneros. The safest way to visit the spot is to find a spot in town to park, then hike back. But an alternative is to find a place to turn around, then park next to a call box while driving east to Sonoma. 

Google Map Coordinates:  Location    Sonoma County, California, United States
38°15′00.5″N 122°24′38.9″WCoordinates: 38°15′00.5″N 122°24′38.9″W




 

The Upcoming Windows 10 Wallpaper.:

The latest YouTube video that reveals the default desktop wallpaper Windows 10 will have, and that exacting details that into making it.




The new design takes the basic Windows logo and shines light through it. Not entirely original for a photo featuring a window, but the resulting image is still cool to look at.

Munkowitz and his team employed camera mapping techniques along with light, haze, lasers, and lens flares to create an image of power generating from beyond the window.

Munkowitz says the basic idea was to treat the logo “as a portal that was allowing us to look into space.” In other words, he let a window be a window.






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