"Photography is the art of the tangible, of reality. It is a moment in time. The very nature of photography is based on three things performed against a pre-existing tangible subject or event found within the scope of reality to produce art: composition, lighting, and color. In photography, you are taking something that exists and committing it to either film or pixel, in the hopes that the story you tell with it will last orders of magnitude longer than the short moment in which it was composed. Sometimes it is distorted (e.g. fashion photography), but is still grounded in either manipulating or fixing the fleeting reality into the permanent."

Yeah, photographers love to make it sound all arty like that ;)  I still don't see the difference.  Modeling is like sculpting, rendering is like photography.  If I download someone's models and render them, I've essentially photographed them with a virtual camera.  There's no guarantee it'll be good or interesting, nor is it necessarily art any more so than a photo of a thumb taken by accident.  It's the aforementioned elements of composition, lighting, and colour that seperate a good, interesting,  rendered image from a poor, boring, one.  Whether the elements rendered were created by the "artist" concerns me much less than how much of the scene composition was their choice.  I'm not defending those people who click load, click render then click save.  I'm just unable to see any appreciable distinction between paying someone to pose for a photo and buying a figure from a vendor with regard to "artiness".  Of course I generally prefer real models to virtual ones but then again a photographer can't really claim credit for any of his model's natural qualities but rather only how they are captured by the photograph.