This is something I posted recently, just as a comment at another,
somewhat-related news thread; but I had been wanting to suggest it for some
time, so  I thought I'd give it its own post...

I believe that an alternate
type of focal blur would be visually/aesthetically useful, one that blurs
the image only from the camera to the
object/point of interest, then keeps the distance beyond that sharp. I'm
thinking along the lines of "hyperfocal distance" in a real camera lens,
but more extreme. It probably has no analog in the real world of lenses, but
I believe (and this is subjective, of course) that it
would help to make the blurring more realistic in some circumstances-- as
for outdoor scenes on a
bright and sunny day.  The blurring that POV currently uses sometimes makes
objects in a scene look "small" or miniaturized--a sharp zone surrounded by
a sea of blurriness.   I realize that real lenses do that (!), and that it's
more pronounced when making close-up photos, depending on the lens aperture.
 But I guess that's the point I'm trying to make: that the current focal
blur has a tendency to make all scenes look like they are close-ups. But
the way we "see" the world, things close to our eyes are blurry, things far
away are sharp (or at least, our brains seem to make it so!)

I'm thinking that implementing such a blur in POV-Ray
would *only* (?) require that image pixels (or rays) "beyond" the point of
max
sharpness not be jittered. As it is now, pixels/rays are jittered (equally?)
in
*both* directions relative to the max sharpness point.

Could this be implemented as easily as I imagine?

Ken W.

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