I created this image in blender 2.5 solely. no external plugins or renderers used. The stump has a bump texture along with a color texture and the defocused forest is from cgtextures. I am planning to add some vines on this. What do you guys think? 
The texturing looks great! The only downside I can see is the bit of specularity towards the bottom - the bark should probably be completely matte.
hey. thanks and yes i see it, its a result of the specular map. im going to remove it and upload again. thanks for the comment.
i made it all matte and uploaded again. thanks for the tip.
Not to spoil the fun! Great execution on the render. Ahhh, might it be possible to post screenshots of nodes, 3D viewport, and what not.
With some more vegetation and few insects, you can finish it of as a great scene.
Good, nice and photorealistic! But i Would like to know how much of it is modeling and how much that is texturing, so a whireframe would be interesting 
Great job! Now, do a forest 
sure here they are
this is the scene in its entirety
compositing nodes, the defocus node only stands to add some depth to the tree alone… the background is separate.
test openGL render as i created the tree and rendered only ONCE, material testing and such was done with GLSL materials
Looks awesome, although for me shape of that tree is a little bit off.
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i plan to 
here is the entire scene
its all in the texturing, the setup was really easy.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]122678[/ATTACH
Attachments
Well, I must say that your lightsetup is very efficient! I like that and especially the texturing of the stump.
Congratulations. Nice job. Simple but impressive. Good texture, lighting and composition. Thanks.
Excellent work. The lighting, textures and DOF are particularly impressive.
Special thanks for including your node setup. I’m just getting to the point where I’m less confused with the basics so I’ve moved on to confusing myself with nodes. Your setup is of great help to me.
Wow, this looks really great!
With the vines I’d say it looks like you tried to replicate that tutorial on Cgtuts (not saying there is anything bad with that).
It looks awesome 
That looks awesome! I agree with dinesharun; more vegetation and insects would look even better. I’m not saying that what you have isn’t great, though
It’s amazing. The best image I’ve ever seen in Blender. However, I’m not calling myself an expert of trees, but the bottom gets wider a little too quickly in my opinion. The bottom just seems a little… off. Still, brilliant image, though.
It looks real! Good work man!
nicely done, thanks to share your settings
thank you all for the kind words. thank you very much!!
unfortunately i never saw that tutorial, i was on a texture hunt and saw the link to the textures… 3ds max doesn’t appeal to me, the less i see it the happier i am.