Quote - My view is it's like photography - but where you define all the elements, but what does everyone else think?

Yes, I think CG art is more like photography than anything else -- even down to the App Wars, which remind me a bit of Nikon vs Canon.  If I want to do some still life, I can go to a garden that someone else planted and photograph there in more or less natural light, or I can buy some flowers from a florist (maybe re-arrange them, maybe not), use a DIY lightbox, or buy a pre-made one, take a few hundred shots, from different angles, with different lights, adding elements such as other plants, fruit, whatever.

The magic (I won't say art) -- that is to say, whatever it is that separates one really crappy shot of precisely the same elements from an outstanding one -- is in a whole series of choices, some minuscule.

Than again, an oil painting is also a whole series of choices made with stuff (paints, canvas, brushes) that someone else (probably) created.  I can paint with oil, but the result won't be very noteworthy because I don't have the experience, learning, or skill to make a satisfying combination of choices.

And artists using traditional media commonly use reference photos.

I think the differnce is that to gain a modest degree of skill takes a lot less time in both photography and CG.  You can make pictures that looks recognizable without really knowing what you're doing, and a lot of the result will be dependant on the quality of the tools you use.  There's a lower barrier to entry.

Drawing something even moderately well takes a helluva lot more practice -- at least, it did for me -- and if you don't continue to practice, like speaking a foreign language, the skill can vanish over time.

 

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PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.