>I asked myself, would the same images, if rendered in CG or photoshopped, lose their charm/appeal? My conscience responds with a resounding "Yes". So, then the process itself must be the art and not the end result.
Taking a slightly different tack from the other responses so far: I don't think your second sentence there follows from your first. You are implicitly asserting that "rendered in CG or photoshopped" would and even could in fact produce the exact same art, and thus the process is the only differentiator. But I think an important limitation and value of doing this in the real world is that we cannot in fact actually perfectly reproduce the real world yet down to the visual spectrum limit. We can produce quite good facsimiles for sure, particularly zoomed out or in motion. But for high quality still photography of complex natural environments doing all the physics and replicating all the creation and weathering processes and so on exactly down to micron type levels is hard. Noting does reality like reality for the time being.
So I do think part of the charm/appeal here is precisely that the photographer is photographing something real, so you can really drill deep into the details with the knowledge that a human hand is revealing and highlighting those details, but did not craft them. Whereas with CG a human made decisions about every single bit of it (if only in choosing what algorithms/seeds were used or what result to accept for further work). Which itself can be extremely interesting! But they're genuinely two different things and I think do speak to different aspects of people.
Taking a slightly different tack from the other responses so far: I don't think your second sentence there follows from your first. You are implicitly asserting that "rendered in CG or photoshopped" would and even could in fact produce the exact same art, and thus the process is the only differentiator. But I think an important limitation and value of doing this in the real world is that we cannot in fact actually perfectly reproduce the real world yet down to the visual spectrum limit. We can produce quite good facsimiles for sure, particularly zoomed out or in motion. But for high quality still photography of complex natural environments doing all the physics and replicating all the creation and weathering processes and so on exactly down to micron type levels is hard. Noting does reality like reality for the time being.
So I do think part of the charm/appeal here is precisely that the photographer is photographing something real, so you can really drill deep into the details with the knowledge that a human hand is revealing and highlighting those details, but did not craft them. Whereas with CG a human made decisions about every single bit of it (if only in choosing what algorithms/seeds were used or what result to accept for further work). Which itself can be extremely interesting! But they're genuinely two different things and I think do speak to different aspects of people.