Posted on 03/29/2014 1:12:32 PM PDT by smokingfrog
Lush green hills under a cobalt blue sky with precisely the right amount of fluffy clouds floating about. Who hasn’t been lost in reverie staring at the default Windows XP wallpaper, dreaming of Middle Earth or maybe a weekend in Cork County?
Yet that shot of a bucolic paradise has turned into a very personal nightmare for Charles O’Lear, the man who captured the iconic photo and sold it to Microsoft.
O’Lear took a one-time payment for the photo rather than trying to negotiate a license fee. Even a tiny fee per Windows XP license would have yielded him a hefty payday over the years.
Surprisingly enough, the photograph was actually taken on the side of a highway in Sonoma, California, rather than Ireland or New Zealand. According to a somewhat hazy estimate by The Sydney Morning Herald, a billion people have viewed the scene since Microsoft bought it.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
At a penny for your thoughts, you are probably seriously overcharging.
No stone walls. :-)
LOL you made my day. As a photographer there is nothing I want to look at in that photo. it is dismissible. Seeing anyone roll down the hill would have been great. I don’t even want to know what is on the other side of the hill and I have a thing like that about hills and mountains. In fact Albert Bierstadt is my desktop artist. Now in his paintings I can get lost.
I always found that photo to be vaguely depressing.
Still the best Microsoft OS.
It's THE GRASSY KNOLL!!!
I had it on my computer for years. Not sure I really ever looked at it. It was the right amount of bland to keep the icons from getting lost.
My perfect desktop was a photo I took with a river and mountain with just a bit of light coming from behind the mountain at sunrise. A third of the screen was pretty dark for the icons, and then the shades of grey got lighter moving up and to the right. Enough in there to look at and explore, but the icons popped out as well.
did he pay the land owner a use fee? I think not.....
LOL!
Solid, warm colors allow me to id the pc (yeah, KVM with 3/4 ports connected...), and quickly find what I need.
Getting rid of the standard issue wallpaper is one of the first things I do.
YMMV.
i thought sol immediately - this guy needs to move on in life
For the kind of money he is THINKING that he would have gotten, Microsft would have used a different picture.
Same w the guy who did Sgt Peppers cover.
I am shocked!
It NEVER occurred to me that it was a real photograph.
I figured since it’s in a computer, it has to be a computer generated image. Not a plane or contrail in sight, it couldn’t possibly be a real photo.
I wonder if he got a cut from the various parodies of the cover, like this one...
Just got my new Win 8.1 machine in 3 days ago, have lightening bolts as my screen saver.
Kind of the mood I was in trying to adjust to the new OS :)
Oh goodie! And the cows came home too!
Correct. If he spends more than a minute thinking he got ripped off he's an idiot.
You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.
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