Graphic insanity

I've spent most of my lesson looking at the blender gallery archives and I'm blown away! Some of these graphics are insane. I didn't even know this sort of thing was possible, check it out at http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/gallery/archive/ it's pretty humbling to see this stuff, most of these renders are of a calibur way above my level. This is the kind of stuff I want to be producing in the future, hopefully I will be there within a couple of years but it's hard to say. I've been using blender for 2 years and have had no formal training, I'd like to think I'm blending at a pretty high level but after seeing the archives it's hard to be cocky. Anyway, the tech-demo is well on the way and I'm hoping to complete and post it by thursday