This picture just sort of came to me while I was experimenting with making terrain through displacement mapping in 3D Studio Max. I've got several bits of natural landscape I've been tinkering with, but this is the one that immediately wanted to be in a picture. Well, maybe not immediately, exactly, but first.

I think I'll pretty much let the picture speak for itself, but some of you would be interested in knowing that I used a couple of texture plugins (Ground Crew and Essential Textures) and the particle plugin Afterburn for the smoke. I rendered the entire scene once but because I didn't like what the shadows were doing on the statue, I did an alternate frame of the left side of the scene with the characters removed; that brought back some warm highlights on the statue that I liked. I'm not even sure how many layers of smoke I rendered but I combined some number of them in Photoshop and composited them in there. I also added a tiny bit of bloom on the highlights - I really don't think you can tell at this resolution - in another layer, and did some retouching too.

I've got another Deviation of a couple of closeups pulled out of the image; they're still much lower res than the original, in which the image area is 6,593 pixels across.