I got bored of looking at the standard Windows and Mac desktop wallpaper, so I decided to re-purpose some of the photographs I have taken on my travels. I have created standard and widescreen versions. They should be high enough resolution even for most developers’ monitors. Happy Christmas.
Licensing
You can freely use these images as wallpaper on your computer. However they may not be modified, used for any other purpose or distributed (except via www.successfulsoftware.net) without my explicit written permission. I retain the copyright and all other rights to these images.
Instructions
Left click on a thumbnail of the appropriate size/aspect-ratio for your monitor.
Right click on the full-size image and select:
- FireFox: Set as desktop background
- Internet Explorer: Set as background
- Safari: Use image as desktop picture
1920 x 1200 wallpaper
These images are suitable for wide screen monitors (aspect ratio 8:5) including:
- 1920 x 1200
- 1680 x 1050
- 1440 x 900
- 1280 x 800
 Stirling Falls, New Zealand. |
 Window reflection. |
 Peak 43, Nepal. |
 Palm, Queensland, Australia. |
 Lenticular clouds near Mount Sefton, New Zealand. |
 Kalahari sand at sunset, Namibia. |
 Heron Island, Queensland, Australia. |
 Waves, Hawaii. |
 A MiG-29 Fulcrum performing the 'cobra' manoeuvre. |
 Dead Vlei, Namibia. |
 Dead Vlei, Namibia. |
 Boyd Falls, New Zealand. |
 Great Barrier Reef, Queensland, Australia. |
 Great Barrier Reef, Queensland, Australia. |
 Aquarium, Plymouth, UK. |
1600 x 1200 wallpaper
These images are suitable for standard monitors (aspect ratio 4:3) including:
- 1600 x 1200
- 1152 x 864
- 1024 x 768
- 800 x 600
 Stirling Falls, New Zealand. |
 Window reflection. |
 Peak 43, Nepal. |
 Palm, Queensland, Australia. |
 Lenticular clouds near Mount Sefton, New Zealand. |
 Kalahari sand at sunset, Namibia |
 An MiG-29 Fulcrum performing the 'cobra' manoeuvre. |
 Boyd Falls, New Zealand. |
 Great Barrier Reef, Queensland, Australia. |
 Aquarium, Plymouth, UK. |
Notes
Creating wallpaper wasn’t as easy as I thought (nothing ever is). You need images that are in landscape format, are not too saturated, contrasty or busy and are cropped and resized to exactly the right width and height. Thankfully I had some tools to help – I used PicCrop to do the cropping, BatchPhoto for batch creation of the thumbnail images, Xplorer2 for batch file renaming and Photoshop Elements for everything else. Some of the images are only available in wide screen format as they didn’t work as well in a 4:3 format.
All the photographs were taken by me with a Minolta Dynax 7D digital camera or scanned from slides taken by me with a Minolta Dynax 700si. Goodbye Minolta cameras, I miss you.
