I'm working on something for the current stills topic, and I decided to try 
out some techniques for making an image more photographic.

The effects are achieved using a parabolic lens placed in front of the 
camera. The effects are:
 1. distortion, hence the horizon not being a straight line. Ordinarily this 
would be a bad thing but I think it helps the composition of this image.
 2. dispersion, the slight separation of colours towards the edges of the 
lens, achieved using pov's dispersion setting on the lens. This is fairly 
subtle in the "elements.jpg" image, but becomes obvious when there's a 
high-contrast edges like the checkerboard scene.
 3. focal blur, this was a little tricky since the lens shifted the focal 
point, so I messed with the camera's blur settings till I got something 
nice.
 4. vignetting, totally faked by just darkening the lens towards the edge.

The blur and dispersion really add a lot to the image, but they're pretty 
slow to render. The elements.jpg image took 19h 5m 45s to render at 
1600x1200.

So what do you think? does it look like a photo?

Tek
http://evilsuperbrain.com

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