Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows Vista, brings to the table a superb collection of imagery designed to act as desktop wallpapers. Vista delivers by default a set of 36 background images set up to enrich the desktop real estate space. And while the saying every image is worth a thousand words may very well be true, the fact of the matter is that the photographs included in Vista have stories all of their own. For example, with Vista, Microsoft has diverged from its traditional sources of imagery for the wallpapers included into the Windows platform. The Redmond company has in fact tapped independent resources, amateur photographers and even its own employees for vistas...

Case in point, the two wallpapers included in this article. If you are already running Windows Vista than you will be able to easily recognize the images. Both are nested in the Textures group of Vista wallpapers. And both were taken by Microsoft employees.

Dina Taylor is a product manager in Microsoft's mobile division and the author of the Vista wallpaper at the top, according to MicrosoftClick. The image is nothing more and nothing less than a field of grass with dew photographed in a morning in downtown Seattle area. A Canon PowerShot G6 did all the heavy lifting...

Gustavo Siqueira, also works at Microsoft, but not in the United States. He is from Sao Paulo and the Vista wallpaper toward the bottom is an underwater photo taken off the northern coast of Brazil, all the way back in 2005. A simple Canon PowerShot S60 was used to capture the image depicting a school of fish which managed to grab Siqueira's attention and deter him from the exploration of a ship wreck.

Both wallpapers are featured in the 60 million Vista licenses Microsoft shipped in the operating system's first six months on the market. However, they are not the sole examples of vistas full of background...

You have already been able to read about the wallpaper belonging to Steve Fu, another Microsoft employee, featuring the glacier at the Enchantment Lakes Basin. Also, you have met Hamad Darwish, "Radiographer / Network Administrator" from Kuwait and author of no less than five Vista wallpapers and quite a few more available for download, but not included in the operating system.

And of course you should revisit the story of Jenny Lam and the Windows Vista Aurora Borealis, the default wallpapers of the operating system, and that of the Vista Starter backgrounds, as well as the Wow graphics delivered free of charge by the Ultimate Extras team.