While trying to fix some of the lighting issues I had when the camera looked toward the window, I found out about this magical thing called a portal light. Before this, I'd just been using normal direction lights and ambient lights with global illumination and final gather. I find the portal light looks more natural, is simpler to deal with as I don't need global illumination any more and it renders in about the same amount of time as my old setup if not faster in some areas. Next I'll be trying out some DOF, maybe the bokeh lens shader. I recommend looking up the portal light if you don't know about it. I found some good tutorials just by doing a google search.