If you own Windows Vista—even if you've only seen ads for it—then you've probably run across this stunning landscape. It's one of the free images that come with Vista to decorate the computer desktop.

Maybe it's even staring you in the face.

An Ansel Adams, perhaps? National Geographic?

That was my guess, until I was headed to a meeting on campus not long ago and spotted a poster-size reprint on the wall. On it was a note congratulating someone name Steve Fu.  

Steve who?

Fu, it turns out, is not a professional photographer but a 39-year-old computer programmer at Microsoft. 

He may lack the name recognition of Ansel Adams or Annie Leibovitz. But you could make the case that this single image has made Fu, at least momentarily, just as successful. Vista now runs on more than 60 million PCs worldwide.  I'm willing to bet that a good number of these people are gazing at Fu's photo even now.

Of all the photos that come with Vista, this one is also my favorite. So I couldn't resist e-mailing Fu to find out where he took it and how it wound up in Windows. "It is a bit of an interesting story," he wrote back.  A few weeks ago, I dropped by his office to hear it.

Born in China, Fu is an expert in the once obscure area of virtualization, basically a technique for conjuring one computer within another. (Some people, for example, now use virtualization software to run Windows on a Mac.) Most days you'll find him coding in his small office—bare except for seven desktop computers, three LCD monitors and a laptop or two. The only framed photo in sight is of his 6-year-old son. 

Fu says he took up photography seriously only about seven years ago. Not surprisingly, he takes an engineer's approach to his hobby: He recently gutted an old laptop and turned it into a digital picture frame. It now hangs on the wall of his suburban Seattle home.

Fu took his Vista photo in 2003 during a camping trip to the Enchantment Lakes Basin, a glacier-etched paradise nestled in eastern Washington's Cascade Range.  It's also a big draw for shutterbugs.

Getting the Vista photo, he says, took some work. Visiting the park where the Lakes are located requires a reservation, which Fu and his companion didn't have. Only a last minute cancellation by another group saved their trip. Then, Fu spent two days lugging 30 pounds of camping and camera gear to the lakes.

More hardships followed. Fu badly wanted a shot at daybreak, when he knew the light would be best. But the weather initially was miserable. 

Finally, the day before he planned to head home, Fu got his break.

He woke up at 5 a.m., mounted his Nikon D100 atop a tripod, attached an 18-35 millimeter lens and opened the shutter. "I knew I had the shot," he says. Like he does with many of his photos, Fu came back and put it up on his computer screen. A few co-workers marveled at it.  But Fu soon swapped it out for something fresh. "I forgot about it," he says.

Then, in January 2006, as development of Windows Vista was winding down, Microsoft put out a call to company shutterbugs. The company typically buys the images it includes with Windows from stock houses such as Getty or Corbis.  But for Vista, officials decided to see what employees could come up with.

More than 1,300 entries flooded in.

When he heard about the contest, Fu thought of his trip to Enchantment Lakes. His wife, who is also a serious photographer, urged him to pick something else. It's too dark, she told him.

Fu submitted it anyway. A few weeks later, he learned he won the grand prize: a $1000 gift card.  But, Fu says, for him that wasn't the real reward.

"People keep asking me, 'Did Microsoft pay you money?' And I say, 'Are you nuts? I'd do it for free. It's like I'm immortal. My photo is immortal for the next decade.'"

These days, Fu confesses to having grown a bit weary of the photo. (I had to ask him to put it up for the picture I snapped of him.)

Well, maybe not totally weary.

Last month, another fan weighed in. "To Steve, Nice Shot" read the autographed print.

It was signed Bill Gates.

<Michael Stroh>

You can see more of Fu's work at his online gallery. (If you really want to make your stomach growl, check out the ones labeled "Jian's Test Kitchen"!)

UPDATE 28 Aug 2007: Windows wallpaper fanatics should check out the website of Hamad Darwish, a contract photographer commissioned by Microsoft to take photos for Vista.  On the site you can download high-res versions of his official Windows images, as well as ones from the Vista shoot that didn't make the cut.