I became interested in ray tracing a very long time ago. I was still using my first 'real' computer (Atari ST) when I first used a ray tracer. The program was very limited only being able to generate scenes with the classic reflecting spheres and chessboard backgrounds in 256 colours. Despite being this limited images took any thing up to 20 minutes to produce. Such was the limited processing power available at the time
I quickly moved on from this very limited program (called pearl, I think) to the big daddy of them all, Pov-ray. I theory now I could generate much higher quality images. I say I theory, because a) I still had very limited processing power on the ST and b) I still couldn't view the images in any more the 256 colours. Because of these factors I didn't really use Pov-ray on the ST much.
When I made the switch to using Windows I now had the colour depth to see the images and the processing 'horsepower' to make images in a reasonable amount of time.
For a while (about a year) I ate, slept and drank pov-ray raytracing. The images in this collection come from that time. Of late I've not touched pov-ray much at all, there are several reasons for this, 1) I'm lazy and I've got other things to do and 2) I now mostly use the mac and believe it or not pov-ray on the mac is just not that good (in my opinion). I'm starting to get back in to this, so maybe you will start to see some more material appearing here!

So what is ray-tracing?
While typing the above it did occur to me that people might not have the foggiest idea what I'm talking about! I this is you, here's a very quick introduction.
Raytracing is a way of generating computer imagery. Reduced to it's simplest, it works in the way the name suggests. The image is made by following the path taken by light beams. So if have a white ray of light which comes from a light and then hits a red surface the reflected light has a red colour to it. In this way raytracing tries to simulate the way we see the world through our eyes.
Povray generates these images by taking a description of the scene and runs then through it's engine to produce the image. Even thought povray doesn't trace every single beam of light (it just couldn't do that), so get an image of good quality a lot of rays need to be traced from source to destination (the virtual camera) which is why so much processing power is needed!