Here's a beautiful long shutter speed image of stars....

Dean Swartz was photographing a black bear family in Minnesota when one particularly curious cub decided to check out his equipment up close. Swartz used the back-up camera slung over his shoulder to capture this image from a safe distance.

Photographer Michael Wesely plays around with extremely long exposures. In case you think we're exaggerating, it takes him two years or more to take one picture. In the wonderful world of digital photography immediate gratification, that's an awfully long time to wait for a single image to be completed, but in this case, it's worth it.

What you see above is a human body. A naked human body, in fact. Japanese photographer Shinichi Maruyama, who has taken some curiously gorgeous shots of nothing but water, didn't use fancy tricks to get the effect you see here, but rather created a composite out of thousands of images to convey a form in motion.