Hiyas,
Now that Blender isn’t simply going to die, I figured it would be worth learning. 
Here’s my first attempt at a non-trivial scene, going naively for photorealism.
(Click on image for larger version.)
Chair is beautiful, lightning is very good, and concept is interesting!
I like it
Stefano
Excellent image. Probably the closest to photorealism I have seen done in Blender. Excellent work.
The lighting is incredible. Makes it that much more beleivable.
BgDM
Superb. Photoreal out the wazoo.
I’m assuming that the banding on the wall is due to compression and that your .tga image is beautiful.
BTW, is there anything special about the wall texture and the lighting? I’ve tried a number of time to get a good, realistic plain wall, but it never looks right. What’s your secret?
Beautiful!!! Is that Blender’s default renderer!? (if so, why do people complain about it? :-? ). I love the tone
I agree with S68…interesting concept. One suggestion: I’d make the mirror larger since it is the element through which you communicate your idea.
Kevin3d i do not think that’s an mirror. It’s an painting. Why did you think that’s was an mirror? And how would it be possible to gett an reflection like that?
Well, I guess i thought that it looked so photorealistic that it would be a mirror (been thinking about raytracing too much 
).
As for the staging not being true to what would be reflected: I thought that also when I saw the image & was thinking “mirror”, but thought it would be too literal to comment on it. perhaps an “impossible reflection” is part of the images content. Photorealism CG is great for “fool-the-eye”.
Well is it an old concept and i think it was called ‘‘throw-time’’ I saw something on TV and he explained how it wold be possible to travel throw time with an example like the picture lycanth made. It’s nice with some classics. Great photoreal on this one!
Nice stuff! Quite photoreal to me… Did you use radiosity? Or did you fake an arealight some way with regular lights?
Damn good lightning. Now tell us all your secrets, how did you do it. (Is the picture 16bit color, shading on the wall could be smoother.)
The picture reminded me of Rene Magrittes painting, I found it from web: http://www.malekzadeh.com/art/magritte09.html
Beautiful
You’ve managed to make the shadow on the wall a little too soft I think, doesn’t look quite real. But hey, that’s just what I think 
- pofo
(Would you happen to have a wallpaper sized render?)
could you rerender this picture and save it ina higher quality? make it a bit bigger while you’re at it 
then it will kick some butt!
Roel
i think that the chair looks kinda like it’s floating because the shadow right under the legs is a bit too soft. otherwise it kicks @$$
wow thats really great, simplicity can always have the best effect =D
as said in all the posts above, but we need to make sure you know, that lighting is amazing!!!
Thanks for the comments. 
I updated the image a little and turned them into PNGs to avoid the horrible compression artifacts.
The secret? Fluking! It’s actually just the default material with a slight orangey tinge, but I had to crank up the radiosity resolution to get the chair’s shadow, so perhaps that helped the wall.
Yep, that’s Blender’s built in renderer. I guess without reflections, cuastics, etc it’s easier to get a convincing result. I’m no expert though, so I don’t really know. Oh, and the picture is now larger.
Yeah, unfortunately the idea isn’t original… I’ve seen it done in a few different places. With this one, I just thought it might be cool to throw a bit of surrealism into something which is otherwise “realistic”.
That’s right - radiosity. There’s a big cube off-frame to the left with a rectangular hole in it (a “window”), and behind that is a plane that’s the radiosity emitter.
Yeah, I tend to work in 16-bit color so I don’t notice when stuff isn’t as smooth as it should be. 
Should be smoother now though.
Oh, also, it’s slightly post-processed in The Gimp (I tried to improve the tonal range a bit and give it more of a sepia feel). Otherwise, it’s the original render.
I love Magritte’s work! This picture wasn’t inspired by that piece, but I guess I had some of his stuff in the back of my mind…
Hehe, I had trouble even getting it to be as sharp as it currently is! For some reason increasing the radiosity resolution any more just puts more patches on the chair and not the shadow on the wall. 
Done, and done. Click on the link to get at a 1024x768 one.
Yeah… I’ve tried to fix this in the newer version by lowering the bottom of the window where light is coming through. It’s a little better now but still floats a bit.
thats awesome! very real looking but the scenes so empty =\ but very nicely arranged… awesome radiosty… the chair floating is what i notcied, but its not bad at all =D great job!
WOW! Nothing more to say…
Great Job!
Henrik
You could try cheating a bit to get that shadow right. Just use the vertexpaint tools to paint a darker shadow over the generated one.
cool work and that you haven’t used Blender that much before
is great, I love it
Oh yeah, that’s a good idea. I think I’ll try that at some stage. For now, I’m sick of this image and need to do something else.