Bliss became one of the digital age’s most recognizable landscape photographs through its use as the default Windows XP wallpaper. Taken in January 1996 near the Napa–Sonoma county line by former National Geographic photographer Charles O'Rear, it captured a vividly green hillside briefly laid open after vineyards were removed because of phylloxera infestation. O'Rear made four exposures with a medium-format camera and later emphasized that the image was not digitally manipulated, despite widespread disbelief. After passing from Westlight to Corbis, the photograph was acquired by Microsoft in 2000, renamed Bliss, and turned into a global symbol of calm, possibility, and a shared computer-era visual memory.