What is Analogue, or is it Analog?
Like so many words, analog can also be analogue. It has two spellings and many meanings.
The only meanings I care about for this discussion are those that relate to 1) clocks and watches, 2) televisions and television broadcast signals, and 3) cameras and photography. Now it is time to sing the song from Sesame Street..."two of theses things belong together and one of these things is not the same."
When the first digital watches appeared on the market, I was desperate to have one on my wrist. These nifty gadgets showed the time in numbers as I would write or type out the time on a invitation - 10:12 was ten twelve; 3:32, was three thirty two; and 12:00 was either 12 noon or 12 midnight. If I was looking at a standard clock on the wall, it would be - almost a quarter past 10 or about half past three. Noon and Midnight were just that.
This was my first introduction into the digital age. With my digital watch which had the smallest of red LED could also tell the date in numbers and even could flash back and forth between the date and time in case you were inclined to need to be reminded of the date every time you checked the time.
So if my new watch was a digital watch, what was my old watch with hour, minute and second hands and day/date dial showing in the window? It was an ANALOGUE watch of course. I never questioned it.
It was not very long before I realized that digital watches were not for me. I needed to "SEE" the time in a picture to understand how much time had passed or how much was yet to go. The digital required me to create an image of a analogue watch in my head, set the hands according to the correct time. I did not realize at first that this was what I was doing every time I looked at a digital clock or watch. I came to realize that I could save my gray matter for better things if I took the short cut to time by going back to the analogue watch. Bye-Bye to the future and hello to what works better for me.
I coasted along pretty well without concern for what analogue might mean in other cases until the introduction of digital broadcast signal from my local television station. I mean I had a very high quality television and the picture was super....until I looked at a HDTV. Whoa! What just happened to my television? Nothing, it all happened to my eye and brain. I was introduced to something someone told me was better because it was brighter, clearer (better black level), sharper, and the audio was a killer. Well I understood the audio part because I had cooked my way into digital sound without any real culture shock since my hearing was not that sharp anyway. (I'm one of those lucky people who can listen to a 1963 transistor AM radio and enjoy the music as much as my iPod. So we bought a 1080 HDTV with 56" screen and hooked it up to an analogue cable system, analogue VCR and analogue DVD player. Smart, huh? Well, it is smart enough when we begin to discover some of the cable HD channels.
Last week we excused our analogue DVD player and installed our first BLUE RAY HD player. We had to buy our first BlueRay movie to make it worth it. Sometimes we do things so backward and so late. Soon DVD and BlueRay will be things of the past as we get our movies through instant play.
My entrance into the world of photography is the result of my father showing me the magic of an image appearing on a white sheet of paper just because we sandwiched a black and white negative between the paper and a burning light bulb for a count of 3, or 5, or maybe 11. Then came my first experience with a Agfa/Ansco box camera that was barely more than a pinhole camera. I had to hold the camera very still and make sure my subject did not move.
The box camera became a Brownie Starlight (or Starmite) which became an another and another until I finally bought my first professional level Nikon when I was 21 years old. Thousands and thousands of feet of film have been rolled by my fingers and by my thumb since that first experience when I was in the second grade. I loved film and it loved me. I had done it all including developing and printing every kind of film except Kodachrome. When ever I moved, I found a place to live where I could set up my darkroom.
Then the day came and digital cameras began their assault. At first, cost and fear of technology kept most of them at bay but eventually the digital camera army backed by every camera company in the world swept other companies out of business such as film processing, film making, chemicals manufactures...and it goes on. The film army held on as long as it could but instant image, instant satisfaction, the release from limited images to infinite images taken in a session and the computer programs that supported the digital army all but drove a silver spike into the film lover's heart. The hard case film photographers have held on and will until they could cannot get the film they needed for their cameras.
Just when the world believed that they had heard the death rattle of film photography for the common person, the next generation discovered the thrill and excitement that comes from taking a picture with a film camera and having to anticipate what it will look like when developed. Suddenly artists around the world, but mostly not in the United States began to seek and demand FILM! The cameras they wanted and were using were not the old last generation of Nikon and Canon film cameras or even the German jewels that had been the tool of the trade for so many journalists and fashion photographers. They wanted funky, cheap, plastic bodies and plastic lenses with no gizmoes, no auto focus, auto exposure. Fixed focus and catch what you can exposure led to a bone fide art form.
The most entrepreneur of all these resurrected film "geeks" built an international business called Lomography. And then they decided to advance the notion that any photography that uses film and is NOT DIGITAL must therefore be ANALOGUE photography. HUH? When did the definition of Analogue come to be "anything that is the opposite of digital. We had Analogue before the word digital was ever conceived. What was the opposite of Analogue before Digital existed? Who knows?
It is a movement that can not be stopped. Film photography is now Analogue photography even though the film is scanned to a digital file for adjustments and then uploaded using digital means to the Internet.
The only meanings I care about for this discussion are those that relate to 1) clocks and watches, 2) televisions and television broadcast signals, and 3) cameras and photography. Now it is time to sing the song from Sesame Street..."two of theses things belong together and one of these things is not the same."
When the first digital watches appeared on the market, I was desperate to have one on my wrist. These nifty gadgets showed the time in numbers as I would write or type out the time on a invitation - 10:12 was ten twelve; 3:32, was three thirty two; and 12:00 was either 12 noon or 12 midnight. If I was looking at a standard clock on the wall, it would be - almost a quarter past 10 or about half past three. Noon and Midnight were just that.
This was my first introduction into the digital age. With my digital watch which had the smallest of red LED could also tell the date in numbers and even could flash back and forth between the date and time in case you were inclined to need to be reminded of the date every time you checked the time.
So if my new watch was a digital watch, what was my old watch with hour, minute and second hands and day/date dial showing in the window? It was an ANALOGUE watch of course. I never questioned it.
It was not very long before I realized that digital watches were not for me. I needed to "SEE" the time in a picture to understand how much time had passed or how much was yet to go. The digital required me to create an image of a analogue watch in my head, set the hands according to the correct time. I did not realize at first that this was what I was doing every time I looked at a digital clock or watch. I came to realize that I could save my gray matter for better things if I took the short cut to time by going back to the analogue watch. Bye-Bye to the future and hello to what works better for me.
I coasted along pretty well without concern for what analogue might mean in other cases until the introduction of digital broadcast signal from my local television station. I mean I had a very high quality television and the picture was super....until I looked at a HDTV. Whoa! What just happened to my television? Nothing, it all happened to my eye and brain. I was introduced to something someone told me was better because it was brighter, clearer (better black level), sharper, and the audio was a killer. Well I understood the audio part because I had cooked my way into digital sound without any real culture shock since my hearing was not that sharp anyway. (I'm one of those lucky people who can listen to a 1963 transistor AM radio and enjoy the music as much as my iPod. So we bought a 1080 HDTV with 56" screen and hooked it up to an analogue cable system, analogue VCR and analogue DVD player. Smart, huh? Well, it is smart enough when we begin to discover some of the cable HD channels.
Last week we excused our analogue DVD player and installed our first BLUE RAY HD player. We had to buy our first BlueRay movie to make it worth it. Sometimes we do things so backward and so late. Soon DVD and BlueRay will be things of the past as we get our movies through instant play.
My entrance into the world of photography is the result of my father showing me the magic of an image appearing on a white sheet of paper just because we sandwiched a black and white negative between the paper and a burning light bulb for a count of 3, or 5, or maybe 11. Then came my first experience with a Agfa/Ansco box camera that was barely more than a pinhole camera. I had to hold the camera very still and make sure my subject did not move.
The box camera became a Brownie Starlight (or Starmite) which became an another and another until I finally bought my first professional level Nikon when I was 21 years old. Thousands and thousands of feet of film have been rolled by my fingers and by my thumb since that first experience when I was in the second grade. I loved film and it loved me. I had done it all including developing and printing every kind of film except Kodachrome. When ever I moved, I found a place to live where I could set up my darkroom.
Then the day came and digital cameras began their assault. At first, cost and fear of technology kept most of them at bay but eventually the digital camera army backed by every camera company in the world swept other companies out of business such as film processing, film making, chemicals manufactures...and it goes on. The film army held on as long as it could but instant image, instant satisfaction, the release from limited images to infinite images taken in a session and the computer programs that supported the digital army all but drove a silver spike into the film lover's heart. The hard case film photographers have held on and will until they could cannot get the film they needed for their cameras.
Just when the world believed that they had heard the death rattle of film photography for the common person, the next generation discovered the thrill and excitement that comes from taking a picture with a film camera and having to anticipate what it will look like when developed. Suddenly artists around the world, but mostly not in the United States began to seek and demand FILM! The cameras they wanted and were using were not the old last generation of Nikon and Canon film cameras or even the German jewels that had been the tool of the trade for so many journalists and fashion photographers. They wanted funky, cheap, plastic bodies and plastic lenses with no gizmoes, no auto focus, auto exposure. Fixed focus and catch what you can exposure led to a bone fide art form.
The most entrepreneur of all these resurrected film "geeks" built an international business called Lomography. And then they decided to advance the notion that any photography that uses film and is NOT DIGITAL must therefore be ANALOGUE photography. HUH? When did the definition of Analogue come to be "anything that is the opposite of digital. We had Analogue before the word digital was ever conceived. What was the opposite of Analogue before Digital existed? Who knows?
It is a movement that can not be stopped. Film photography is now Analogue photography even though the film is scanned to a digital file for adjustments and then uploaded using digital means to the Internet.
- (of a device or system) in which the value of a data item (such as time) is represented by a continuously variable physical quantity that can be measured (such as the shadow of a sundial)
analogue, analog –adjective
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