Quote - Just some added thoughts:

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6. Don't forget Depth of Field! We are not Superman and we aren't The Who - We can't see for miles and miles, without losing any perception. Our focus extends to a very, very narrow part of our vision and, at that, only within a certain range of depths. Use Depth of Field wisely and realistically in order to help produce the best, most realistic, renders.

I disagree on Depth of Field. DOF is vital to getting photorealism, where it looks like a photo. However, if you are trying to make it look like a real scene, DOF forces our attention to what is in focus. It is true that our eyes have a limited DOF, but when we are looking at a real scene, we can choose what to focus on. When I'm standing by my home office window, I can focus on the window, or on the tree outside, or on the hills in the background. Whichever of those I don't focus on is blurred, but the important thing is that whatever I am concentrating on ends up in focus. Filmmakers exploit this when they change the focal plane from the foreground to the background (for example), or use a camera with a great depth of field in order to "flatten the image".

This, BTW, is a major problem I had with Avatar. Since most of the environment was CGI, I was frustrated by the fact that my attention was constantly being forced to the actors, rather than being allowed to wander to the world. Contrast this to "Monsters Inc.", which didn't use forced DOF.