Hamad Darwish, a photographer, was comissioned by the Windows Vista team to take a series of photographs of which some would be used as wallpapers in the new OS. Long Zheng introduced him via some blog posts. In the interview Hamad mentioned releasing the entire set of photographs to the public. The shots are simply amazing. Here is the link to his site and the photos. He also has a Flickr page.
Long's original blog post.