There are a series of precautions you need to apply before posting your photos on the web, be it on FlickR, Renderosity or on a personal website.

1. Make sure you use a license restricting any unwanted uses. The 'common license' on FlickR seems way too permissive. I use a Creative Commons license for photos posted on my website that prevents any commercial use or transformation.You also need to make sure that the license terms are understandable and make a direct link to the file whenever it is possible
2. Never, ever post a high res picture on the web. This is begging to have it stolen. There are many possible uses for pictures of more than 700 pixels wide. You can resell it through microstock websites, have them printed, crop them and use them on a website... And there is a fairly large choice of high res pictures posted on the web to do this... including on most of the galleries at Renderosity! I once had a 800 pixels wide photo of a giraffe stolen and used on the French edition of Science magazine. The resolution was enough to make a half page without pixellization.
3. Include a signature on your pictures whenever you post them on the web. It may be cropped out, but may limit some uses of your photos.
4. If you have a personal website, make sure you forbid hotlinking with a script in your .htaccess. Uncontrolled use of your photos can be really damaging, if done on a large scale. I once had 26 of my photos used in an email message sent to thousands of people in the Middle East. Bandwith usage on my website quickly skyrocketed to 8 Gb a day, prompting my ISP to close the website. It took a week to go back to normal.

Has Canon made all it's PMA announcements yet? So far I have only seen announcements for one DSLR and 4 digicams. No lenses at all? If so, this year's would be a rather poor crop.

This one is for the monochrome part.
The bridge of Arts in Paris, on a winter evening. No color editing as far as I remember.

A second one. Shot in digital (hence color) but it is almost black and white.

Here is a first try.
Shot in Limousin, France early morning

Lyne's Poser models had chicken if I remember well. But her store is closed now.

Have a look at Hexagon.
It is the true successor of the old (non-pro) Amapi 7 designer. It has interesting improvements over it, like UV Mapping or a nice subdivision preview

You can pick up the demo here :
http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/support/downloads/51lklh7gtm843o9vhrd89oq2c6/?product=hexagon

You have a series of tutorials here:
http://forums.polyloop.net/hexagon-tutorials/
Be sure to make the tutorials. As for many modelers, you cannot really do anything if you don't learn it. Try a basic one, then the camera one.

In 6.1 is that you can rotate the HDR image around the scene. If you wanted to do this before, you had to rotate the whole scene, camera included.

Check out this website before buying anything:
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/show_creator_details.php?creator_id=10

I have been usig Bryce since version 2.1 and now have Bryce 6.1. I have recently purchased Vue 6 Infinite,  convinced  by the demo reels and images I saw. I delayed this decision for a long time as I have tested Vue 1.2 and Vue 3 and was not convinced at the time.

Bryce has had a long time without developments in it and it lacks a lot of features that are vital, especially if you render views of outside scenes.

• ground vegetation and the fantastic ecosystem feature. There is currently no practical way to
• advanced render modes (global illumination and radiosity). It does have IBL and renders pretty well with it
• realistic atmosphere models. Though you can get good results with Bryce, but nothing close to the spectral atmosphere of Vue. Bryce clouds do not seem to have changed since V3!

Vue (especially Pro Studio and Infinite) has a lot more features.

As for the interfaces, I am more a fan of the Bryce one, but I think it is a matter of taste and habits. I have got used to it and find it easier to use than the Vue one and more esthetic. It also has less display glitches (no disappearing objects). Object geometry adjusts automatically when you move them, in Wireframe mode the lines are all antialiased, etc.
And the interface of some modules in Vue (terrain editor) is a pity when you compare it to Bryce, though it offers .

As for render times, Bryce has long been known for being very slow, especially compared to Vue. I think the render speeds are comparable at equivalent quality. Bryce default render quality is higher than in Vue with very accurate antialiasing and no graininess. If you want to get the same quality in Vue that Bryce offers by default, you have to push render settings and it gets slow. Funnily, the programs have the same issues with some options (DOF is equally unuseable in both of them)

And yes, I personnally find that Vue 6.5 is buggier than Bryce 6.1, but it handles a lot more things in its scenes. It is also way more expensive and needs a beefier machine to handle it. I have a dual core Athlon and 2 gigs of RAM and have had resource problems with Vue I have never had with Bryce.

I think they are used to add local winds.

Check out this demo video and you will see them in action (towards 2'45)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCXs8Qytzac

I have no such problems. I managed to pan normally with this built (292230)

Those maps are normally intended for a 3d Space Simulator Celestia. I think the normal maps and their levels can only be used within it, but never tried them.
The legal info about the files is here

Here is another resources that has huge maps of almost every object of the solar system (including Venus moons), for free.

http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/show_creator_details.php?creator_id=10

Some maps are truly huge (4000*2000 pixels and more)

Note that there are individual pages for each planet, everything is not on this page.

(X posted to the Bryce forum too)

On my hard disk, I have maps that are even larger. Jupiter maps at 4000*2000 pixels.

I found the website where I got them: http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/show_creator_details.php?creator_id=10

Beware, some of these things are truly HUGE (30Mb + jpegs)

I had not been to this website for a while and it seems new maps have been added.

Here is an example image using maps of Jupiter and its satellites

For sky backgrounds, I do not use fixed images, but pictures generated with [Universe Image Creator

](http://www.diardsoftware.com/)