If you’re old enough to have used a computer before smartphones ate the world, you have stared at this photograph more than you’ve stared at most members of your own family: a green hill, a blue sky, and a few clouds doing absolutely nothing in particular. It was the default Windows XP wallpaper, it shipped on more than a billion machines, and it has been called the most-viewed photograph in human history.

A lot of people assumed it was computer-generated, some Microsoft art department’s idea of a perfect nowhere. It wasn’t. It’s a real hill in California, and the story of how it got there is stranger and better than the fake version.

The photographer was Charles O’Rear, a 25-year veteran of National Geographic who was, frankly, overqualified to be remembered for a desktop background. As CNET and other interviews lay it out, he was driving through wine country one Friday in the late 1990s on his way to visit his girlfriend, Daphne, in Marin County. He wasn’t working. He just happened to have his Mamiya RZ67, a medium-format film camera roughly the size and grace of a cinderblock, riding along with him.

The reason those........

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