Only one thing though. I agree with Staci Borchart that these photos should be by themselves; they are to good to be sized down and put on a background. Cheers, I look forward to seeing them as wallpapers by themselves!To highlight warm texture of wood, I decided to use HDR (High dynamic range) technique. To create HDR photo, you need camera with auto exposure bracketing (AEB), such as my Canon 400D. Put camera on a tripod, open camera menu, set AEB to maximum (-2..+2 for Canon 400D). To avoid even small shaking, set Drive mode to Self-timer / Remote control and then take a photo with remote control. Camera will take 3 photos with different exposures (normal, under, over).
Next step is to generate HDR image from these 3 photos. I used program called Photomatix Pro, but Adobe Photoshop CS and later has this feature too (File - Automate - Merge to HDR).
Often, HDR images look too strong, unrealistic. To avoid that, I loaded normally-exposed photo to Photoshop (layer 1), then added HDR image (layer 2), and set layer 2 opacity to 50-60%.
The final step was to add vintage effect to photos. I learned it from wonderful Veerle blog. I also wrote a tutorial how to automate this effect.
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Gracias
Rana