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From scooby@pld.com:
Nicely done image.  Very pleasing to the eye.  Excellent use of textures.

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From Sean_Hamilton@amrcorp.com:
It's pics like this that made me get into raytracing to begin with.  This
picture
works on so many levels I scored it a 20 artistically.  I was drawn into the
scene before it hand even finished downloading.  I love the tree, the flames
are the best I've ever seen (where can I get that GUI!) and the blimp and
sky are evocotive.  The only snag is that your sky lost some of its quality
in the jpg conversion, a higher quality setting may have helped that.  
This is a peaceful scene that evokes the emotions exactly as you wanted in
your description.  Beautiful.

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From nx@chez.com:
I won't reject your opinion about camera focus (and other nice considerations
from your first post). My guess is that focal blur is simply more realistic
since we usually see that effect even with digital camera. Because nothing
can focus everywhere while the picture is shot. Say, a real picture is normally
*not* rendered :) Just my guess...
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From gmol@my-dejanews.com:

I like the colors in the picture
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From gmccarter@hotmail.com:
I think the image would look better with focal blur. Hold a pencil in front of
your face, and look at a distant building.  How do you know the building is
more distant than the pencil?  Because you see one, (relatively) small,
in-focus building; and two, (relatively) large, out-of-focus pencils.  Humans
use three methods to judge distance: parallax, relative size of objects, and
focus.  You use one method in this image.  Why not use two?

By the way, nice image.  I might have to try this Vue thing.
Nice distant landscape.  Nice water.  Very nice foreground plants.  Too bad they
are in focus.  Lousy fins on the airship.  Sky seems brooding grey, but the
island is in bright sunlight... mistake or clever layout?

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From bill@apocalypse.org:
nice job with the coloring, and I always like to see a blimp in an
image.  The flames look real good too.

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From wozzeck@club-internet.fr:
Nice pic!
VE really seems promising.
About your pic: there are several artifacts in the fire (spherical containers
are visible), and something strange in the sky (a kind of line going to the
right-top corner).