Quote - There will be a point in time when someone who started using Daz / Reality / Lux will take up photography and use the techniques he/she learned thanks to Paolo and find his/her results to be very good.

The hardest thing for a Daz user is to let go of all the 'tricks' learned to get a nice image and switch to thinking like a photographer.

I remember well Paolo saying so back in the days I sarted using Reality.

These days I roam the web and look at youtube vids photographers make to show their 'secrets'. Recently I search for 'Glamour photography' and there are many, many vids showing how to set up lighting for that.

THe wonderful thing is that with Reality you can apply those techniques and get the very same result you see in the vids.

I'd say: "Paolo for President"! :)

Absolutely agree with all of that (except that I'm sure Paolo would not want to be president!). I was very keen on photography when I was a teenager. I had a manual SLR, light meter, etc., did a bit of my own D&P and had all the books out of the library. I've forgotten much of it, but what I do recall has been very useful when using Reality. Not only that, I've painlessly relearned quite a bit about photography through using Reality and it's given me the confidence to have a go at doing some profile portraits for our website at work. Having seen what the pros have produced in the past, I think I may be able to do almost as good a job (and save us a lot of money in these hard times!). It may end up being a disaster, but won't cost anything more than a bit of my time.

You're dead right about how it can be a bit of hurdle for people who have got into the paradigm of DAZ (or Poser) lighting—we had someone here recently with exactly this difficulty. It's easier for "dissidents" like me. I could never get my head around the shenanigans and anti-intuitive knowledge required to do good renders in DAZ and Poser's built-in systems. I guess those into fantasy and sci-fi will miss some of the jiggery-pokery that can be done with biased rendering, but, after all, special effects have to be faked in movies for exactly the same reasons that they do in Luxrender, and the solutions are similar: mattes, compositing, etc. Post-effects and clean up are almost as old as photography and movie-making themselves, after all.