Bruce Rayne? Wasn't he Batman?
My own argument here would be to do with the art of CG. Whilst your traditional photographer friend might be able to create some nice still life photos, what we can do as CG artists is to have pin-point precision over lighting as well as what we include in our pictures. For example say I wanted a picture of an expensive watch - now I don't own an expensive watch and nobody would be stupid enough to lend me an expensive watch to take photos of in the first place so my alternative is to make a CG model and then render it.
I also think there is a certain level of respect that goes with creating photorealistic scenes in CG. A quick trip over to A.N.Other website where there aren't that many sophisticated CG artists, and you'll find people going "Woo, looks like a real photo" to even the simplest of setups. I think as CG artists, we consider it a skill to create scenes that can pass for photoreal. After we've mastered that skill and gotten bored with it, then we start letting our imagination run a bit wild and start creating scenes and images that a traditional photographer would be hard pressed to recreate without significant time and effort. How many photographers would have access to a McLaren to take photos of it a la Philip's tutorial?
To me, creating photorealistic scenes with CG is just part of our skill-set and it is one that people respect because of the difficulty level that can be involved in making the scene totally believable or perfect. Its the magic of making people take a second glance to discover if what they are seeing is truly a photo or a piece of CG. Then on top of that we can usethat skill set to produce images totally from our imagination - we can create our own design of building, we can create our own design of pocket watch or pen to render, if we don't like something, we can change it and its a darn sight easier for us to do than it would be to do in photoshop, especially if you want images at many different angles.
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