I spent a good deal of time working this scene -- and used brushmaps to alter the appearance of the objects more extensively than I ever have. In particular, I explored the use of Brightness maps on the bulb (not seen), lamp shade and body, table top, eggs and ceramic planter to achieve the lighting effects that I wanted. As you can see, the modeling is fairly simple, most of my time was spent on surfacing and lighting.
The longest modeling project in the scene is the plant. The stem and branches of the plant were modeled in Organica and the leaves were hand modeled in the Forms and detail editors. Each leaf is individually placed so that it is in contact with the brances of the plant. A future project I plan on working on involves a much more detailed and accurate plant.
The room's main light is a single shadow casting lightsource placed within the lightbulb. There are four non-shadow casting fill lights placed in the corners of the room, several thousand Imagine units up from the scene. These fill lights create an even overall lighting without shadows.
After placing the main and fill lights and rendering the image, I studied the lighting and decided where I would have to cheat a bit to get the results that I wanted. Unfortunately, Imagine doesn't have the ability for a light to affect only a single object, so I resorted to using brightness maps, created specifically for each object to lighten shadows where needed.
Another technique for doing this would be to render multiple versions of the image and compositing the images together to get the desired lighting. For exmaple, this final image is actually a composite of the entire scene and the planter. The planter was included in the original render, but the pot was too dark. So I created a brightness map for the pot, created a new scene from which I deleted all the objects except the planter and then rendered the image (including alpha channels). I then compsited the planter back into the original image and got the result that I wanted. This resulted in a much faster rendering time than if I had re-rendered the entire scene.