Sometimes you might see the term "digital art". You might wonder, what does that mean? The most literal explanation is that it is art that is created on a computer instead of, for instance, by paint and canvas. Digital art is a somewhat broad term. It can be applied to a piece that someone painted using digital tools; it can be a digital photo; it can also be a hybrid in which some or all of a digital photo is merged with digitally painted art.
That's probably fairly unclear! LOL So let's get a little more concrete. There is a quite common trend for photographers to take photos of models and then place those images into a fantasy world that has been created by digital painting or by using collage to combine aspects of different photos. This is very popular. I would refer to this a digital art.
My approach is different. While I might process my photos to emphasize or de-emphasize certain elements, I choose not to make significant additions or subtractions to what was actually there. The challenge I set myself is to find something interesting to shoot in and of itself. I'm not criticizing the other approach; this is simply a matter of taste. I consider my work to be more digital fine art photography than digital art. There is overlap between the terms, but because I choose not to make significant alterations of elements, I prefer to think of my work as fine art photography.
What do I mean by significant changes? I use as my guide what I understand to be more or less the approach Ansel Adams used. I might remove a branch or a power line that distracted from a landscape. I would not add a tiger to a landscape. Ansel Adams did a lot of work in the darkroom to bring out the best in his photos; he could lighten or darken areas, emphasize or de-emphasize contrast, process as color or black and white, and so forth, but he would not add a mountain where there wasn't one. I follow a similar aesthetic.
I've talked elsewhere about what makes good art. That's a hard question to answer, but I can offer some thoughts on what makes "bad" art. I see a lot of digital art where a model has been shot and then plunked into a fantasy scene. I have no objection at all to this, but when you look closely, 9 times out of 10 you will see that the model is lit from one side and the landscape from the other. Or the model is 10 times larger than a real person would be in that landscape. It is actually quite tricky to match the lighting, scale, shadows, and perspective when mixing elements that are shot differently. A few people are very good at it, but most are not. To my eye it is jarring when I see a shadow going to the left under the model but the tree next to the model has a shadow going to the right. That totally destroys the willing suspension of disbelief that good fantasy inspires. The other thing that is a pet peeve of mine with this fantasy art is when a nude woman (it seems like it's always a woman!) is dropped into a rocky landscape. I have nothing against nudes, but when I see one of these, my first reaction is always to tell her to put some shoes on or her feet are going to get cut up and to put some pants on before she sits on that rock. There's a reason we wear clothes; it's not just modesty, it's also to put some protection on sensitive parts. But that's just my reaction; perhaps yours is different.
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