Do you want to be famous? Are you a good photographer?
If you are a good photographer chances are that you can be famous in this age of blogging and flickr. Hamad Darwish is an amateur photographer who has toyed with cameras for only about two years now. He shares a lot of his work with others on flickr and learns a lot in return. So how did he become famous? Microsoft paid him to take some good pictures and used a couple of his pictures as background for Vista. You can read the entire interview he gave to Long Zheng here.
Obviously you now have to wait for the next version of Windows 
to get a request which means you have around 2 years to learn, do some good photography and make yourself noticable 
. With all the money that Microsoft has it still chose to go with amatuer photographers for Vista backgrounds 