Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed (2015)

My home studio doesn't have plain, unobstructed walls for some simple shots, and while a paper roll backdrop is a good substitute, sometimes you want a wall, or a corner, or you just want to use wallpaper.

So I built a massive construction with doubled-up cardboard sheet, girders made with pallet corners, these gigantic split pin things and hot glue, and then I spray-mounted wallpaper on it.

I also did it at the wrong time of year, when the air was still too damp and the heating needed to be on, so it didn't last an enormously long time before things rippled, because it turns out cardboard has some quite organic behaviours in moist air.

So it was almost a failure. But I'd absolutely do it again, replacing the cardboard with foamcore or thicker insulating board.

It was a really fascinating, liberating process to take that much control over the process, and I've been doing similar since, assembling my own photographic tools to a level that looks a bit like obsession.

I think maybe many software developers here don't understand the parallels between doing this sort of thing and assembling your "stack" for a few applications.

A true photographer's "tools" barely even start with the camera. There's a whole array of tools beyond that, beyond peripherals, that extend into the scene or into methodology.

And that's fine. That's all it has to be. Something aesthetically appealing and universally brandsafe. But it's not not-soulless.

Have you ever read a F500 companies press release about a (re)branding or new logo or something? Where they retell the story the branding consultants told the executive suite about what the new image means and the vibe it embodies? But the end result is just bland nothingness that doesn't standout from the pack at all?

That's the energy in every Apple attempt to show personality. Hypercalculated and ultimately meaningless.

I'd call it an artifact of only having 16 colours to work with when SETUP boots. Obviously, most machines at the time had more to work with than that, but VGA - which is to say, 16 colors at 640x480 - was the baseline. And remember that Windows 95 could be installed from _floppies_; looking fancy is good, but you don't want to gratuitously use disk space. No multiple versions of the same image for you!

Let's take this fancy "Mac with some other random shit on a desk" image from Unsplash:

https://unsplash.com/photos/black-and-white-self-balancing-b...

Here's what it looks like with various ways of reducing it to 16 colours:

https://imgz.org/iC7KufjC.jpg

(I know, the images are small on a modern display! Each square is full-size, because we're VGA.)

Top left is the original, obviously. Top right is what happens if you just reduce it to 16 colours; it looks like nothing in particular, and it weighs in at 153K (exported in a modern graphics editor), or more than a tenth of a 3.5" floppy disk. Bottom left is what happens if you do it with dithering; you can make it look like you have more colours than you actually do, but it also weighs 153K.

And bottom right is SETUP.BMP. It only uses _two_ colours from the palette ("0, 0, 255" blue and black). That's 1-bit colour which means my SETUP.BMP when exported to an actual BMP only takes up 38.5 kilobytes.

So the answer to your question, I suppose, is "use as few colours as possible and don't waste disk space" or "dithering" or "the 90s", but often the technical limitations of a period plus time become an aesthetic.