I work in the refurb department of an e-waste recycling company. I take pictures of monitors and TVs showing Bliss, and I test printers with it. It has bright spots, dark spots, it's colorful, and has plenty of fine detail, making it a decent test picture. Bonus points for being familiar to most people.
Back when Deep Learning wasn't just LLMs and diffusion models (approximately 5y ago), for my senior project at uni I did a image animation. In goes an image, out comes a short gif. It was trained via (reverse) optical flow.
I used this image for a demo how clouds move and the audience+professors all went WOOOW and that is now a core memory of mine
“Microsoft paid photographer Charles O’Rear a confidential amount for the Windows XP wallpaper “Bliss,” but it is widely reported to have been in the “low six figures,” meaning over $100,000.”
Charles should have asked for MS stock instead.
“In 2005, Facebook offered David Choe about $60,000 to paint murals at its office. Instead of cash, he chose Facebook stock. When Meta Platforms went public in 2012, his shares were estimated to be worth around $200 million.”
I always thought it was a synthetic image. I expect many others did too.
On some level, they chose the real image that appeared to be a synthetic image.
I stumbled onto MSN for a story about Bears in a sanctuary who had overhead ropes (horizontally laid), and what a difference it had made.
Actually, I don't remember the story that well. What I do remember is that MSN story used a GEN AI image. Fake bears, fake rope. There, of course, are real photos available.
But MS want that automation, dont want to pay writers, or editors, and don't want to pay royalties or seek permission for photographs.
Does anyone have any idea what RZ67 lens was used? People have found the exact hill and from this one might be able to figure out from what perspective it was captured, thus which focal length it was shot at. I haven't found anyone who has done this, only vague, unconvincing speculation. Maybe confounders like fact that it is now covered by a vineyard and erosion long since changed the shape of the hillsides makes this impossible.
> 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
> "I don't think the engineers or anybody at Microsoft had any idea it would have the success it had
They also flew him out to deliver it. I feel like they had an idea of what they had.
It appears MSFT never wanted to see the image used outside of Windows. Would be interesting to know if had been sold as a stock image by either Westlight or Corbis, and if so what the licensing terms were. Let's assume someone did pay for rights to use when it was available open stock. Did MSFT contact each purchaser and buy their rights ?? Not saying that happened. I have, though, purchased many images over the years via image sellers, and have seen many of those images pulled by the photographer. Called the stock agency to check, and yes my rights are "...in perpetuity".
Windows XP was released when I was in college, and I remember discussing this picture with my friends guessing where it could've been taken. Never thought about California back then, let alone moving there.
A little bit less than twenty years later, few years after moving to the US, my family and I were driving somewhere near Sonoma, CA, enjoying the views, and someone in the car said something like that this looks like that Windows background. Quick check with Google, and sure enough, we were less than a mile away. We didn't stop, but surely got some photos.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 63.2 ms ] threadhttps://archive.org/details/bliss-600dpi
Ironically, I only run Linux at work.
I used this image for a demo how clouds move and the audience+professors all went WOOOW and that is now a core memory of mine
ChatGPT:
“Microsoft paid photographer Charles O’Rear a confidential amount for the Windows XP wallpaper “Bliss,” but it is widely reported to have been in the “low six figures,” meaning over $100,000.”
Charles should have asked for MS stock instead.
“In 2005, Facebook offered David Choe about $60,000 to paint murals at its office. Instead of cash, he chose Facebook stock. When Meta Platforms went public in 2012, his shares were estimated to be worth around $200 million.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfridges_Birmingham
On some level, they chose the real image that appeared to be a synthetic image.
I stumbled onto MSN for a story about Bears in a sanctuary who had overhead ropes (horizontally laid), and what a difference it had made.
Actually, I don't remember the story that well. What I do remember is that MSN story used a GEN AI image. Fake bears, fake rope. There, of course, are real photos available.
But MS want that automation, dont want to pay writers, or editors, and don't want to pay royalties or seek permission for photographs.
Is this OK for your kids?
> "I don't think the engineers or anybody at Microsoft had any idea it would have the success it had
They also flew him out to deliver it. I feel like they had an idea of what they had.
A little bit less than twenty years later, few years after moving to the US, my family and I were driving somewhere near Sonoma, CA, enjoying the views, and someone in the car said something like that this looks like that Windows background. Quick check with Google, and sure enough, we were less than a mile away. We didn't stop, but surely got some photos.
The actual place is a vineyard now.
It was just prior to photo being taken.