Digital photography has changed the way people take photos, and how many are taking them. Anyone with a camera can be a photographer these days, and many of those want to be professional photographers or artists, though they can be the both. All over the internet there is a rise of those who are calling themselves Fine Art Photographers; so maybe it is time to look into what they are and how they are different to the usual photographers.

Recently I heard a photographer online saying that you could go wacky on an image, add a weird curving blur, then call it fine art. That doesn’t make an image artistic, that just makes it silly.

There doesn’t seem to be a definitive explanation or definition for what Fine Art Photography is, but there do appear to be things that help define what it is.

When I was doing my fine art degree, part of what was required was to take turns putting our work up on the wall for critique. During these sessions we talked about techniques, what was working, and what wasn’t. We would also discuss the ideas behind the work and where we wanted to go with it.

On top of those we had individual tutorials with lecturers to help us discuss our ideas and how to achieve them. The idea was to get a plan together of how to go about doing the work, what we could use to support it, and looking at other artists that did similar work to see how they conveyed their ideas. These were invaluable, in that they helped us work out what we were doing and the direction we needed to go.