It turns out that, in the Cycles raytracing rendering engine of Blender, you can manipulate the light using the material & rendering nodes. For example: in nature, the light intensity falls off with the inverse square of the distance: something two times as far away is illuminated four times less bright.
If you want to create an illustration of the Trees from JRR Tolkien's Silmarillion, this is a bit of a problem: for the light of the Two Trees was supposed to illuminate maybe not all of Aman, but at least the central portion of it. If that light would have followed the same sort of fall-off laws, even when Corollaire would have been unbearably brightly lit, the rest would still be way too dark.
Enter the constant light fall-off option in said nodes - among other things, it's possible to separate the light that the camera sees directly from light that's bounced off diffuse surfaces. So, the "reflected" light can be routed via a constant intensity fall-off route while the direct camera light can be left in the default quadratic fall-off position. This has the overall effect that the emitted light that illuminates the world around the tree doesn't weaken with the distance. It still casts shadows, of course, so eventually the circle of light is still somewhat limited. But that's OK. The direct camera-light cannot be done that way because it would completely oversaturate the image, leaving only washed-out white "holes"; but with that light following a regular path it works well.
This is just a very rough generated landscape with one grass texture, and a tree with a handful of leaves - just to try the concept.
And Telperion, of course, with just leaves - no flowers.
The 1 x 4 x 9 sized black slab appears courtesy of Arthur C. Clarke
PS Facebook, I wasn't with anyone in particular while doing this. Or maybe I was. Whatever, it's none of your business. Just as "where" I was. Blehhhh! *long nose*
