stbenge wrote:

 > Thomas de Groot wrote:
 >
 >> What can I say.....?
 >
 >
 >
 > How about, "now try a real scene, with more than one point of focus." 
I really do need to make something more complex...




The 'macro photographic world' *is* complex and fascinating.  And 
creating an image that sustains that type of observation is not trivial. 
  It goes to why we do art at all, and this type of art (raytracing) in 
particular.

You are hiking in some landscape.  You are, in some moment, overtaken 
with the sublime. You grope for a focus.  Taking your gaze away from the 
horizon, you stoop and pick up a pebble.  It is tactile and observable, 
and a part of the beauty that has just overwhelmed you.  It gives you a 
place to start.  And just as did Leonardo, you observe in the pebble, 
traces of the same consuming forces that you sense in the expanding 
landscape.

Mimesis, in art, has often an incomplete feeling about it, that it is 
merely a means to a greater end.  Yet more than a few have made it a 
vehicle for meaning in an of itself.  Mimicking patterns from nature has 
always been one of the primary, even unique, fascinations of POV-Ray. It 
exists, in an unspoken way, as an end in itself.  One strategy to move 
it from the unspoken to the spoken is to produce a 'study' which alludes 
to a more 'ambitious' use for the pattern.  But you have done something 
  more confrontational.  Your one possible dodge is that this is merely 
a study in lighting/diffusion and the piece of stone an indifferent 
subject.  Fine, but it does not really blunt the fact that we are 
directed to observe the raw, immutable nature of a rock.  That is 
inescapably the subject.  It is far from a trivial accomplishment.

-Jim

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