Just like all other art forms, fine art photography is a craft.  I recently visited two exhibits in DC that reminded me of this fact.  First was the national gallery exhibit, "history of photography before digital cameras".  It was a wonderful trip down memory lane.  While the exhibit started with images from the 1830's and took the viewer to Cibachrome images of the early 1990's, my personal experience only started 50 years ago.  I constructed a pinhole camera using mat board and a hole poked in aluminum foil as the lens.  This camera used a paper negative and I made "contact" prints for a positive monochrome print image, all developed in an open tray of liquid chemicals.  No rubber gloves were involved, as OSHA didn't exist. The exhibit covered this process quite well and had several fine examples.   Interesting enough, the last time I used my home darkroom was to produce cibachrome prints, directly from slide film, in the mid-1990's.   Yes, they are holding up quite well, framed on my walls.  

After my tour of the National Gallery, I wandered down the street to the Museum of Nature History to see the Nature's Best photography exhibit.   This exhibit picked up where the National Gallery exhibit left off.  The images were exquisite, evoking emotion responses from the viewers.  Almost all were made with digital camera's and processed with computer software.  I was particularly struck by the montage flower portraits in  Nature's Best new "Creative Digital" category.   It made me think how all artistic crafts have evolved over time.  It also made me think that each artist, photographic or otherwise, has choices in how they develop their own individual craftsmanship and how they create the final image.   In the case of these flower images, the photographic artist could have created the image by arranging the flowers prior to taking the photograph.  Or she could have made multiple exposures in camera, as she built the image.  Or she could have taken individual images on film and made multiple exposures in the printing process.  But what she actually did was to create a digital image of each individual flower and then stitch the individual images together using up to 60 layers in Photoshop.  Like many photographers, her inspiration came from a classic painter.  Mulling this all over in my mind, I realized it didn't really matter how she did it.  The composition and quality of the resulting final image is all that mattered.   Nature's Best decided her images used the picture space better than other images submitted.    

Over my life I have listened to other's say "Photography is dead" with the advent of new tools and techniques in the photographic craft.   It seems there will always be early adopters and those naysayers, highly resistant to change.  I heard it in the 1950's when color film replaced black & white as the film of choice by consumers.  I heard it again in the 1960's when 35mm SLR cameras replaced the large format sheet film cameras used by photojournalists.  I have heard it recently when Photoshop replaced the wet darkroom.   Looking at the photographic images in the Nature's Best exhibit and at NVPS competitions, I know such a notion is pure nonsense.  With the advent of digital cameras and programs like Photoshop, fine art photography is more alive and vibrant than it has ever been in its 170 year history.  Artists by nature are creative souls, always seeking the new, perfecting their craft and improving the tools and techniques of their craft.  My day was well spent by enjoying the resulting images of the craftsmanship of many photographic artists.   I highly recommend both exhibits.