Misnomer – Analogue Photography

Just because there is a digital camera doesn’t mean that there is an opposite of the digital camera, called the analogue camera. Calling it an analogue camera is akin to calling the conventional optical/film camera a non-digital camera. Likewise, there is no such thing as analogue photography, analogue print, or analogue photo printer.

Perhaps older Nikon users will remember the naming issue of the older lenses being called by what it is not. With the introduction of the newer AI lens (short for Auto Indexing), a lot of people out there referred to the predecessor as non-AI lens. This is completely absurd. You can refer to them as pre-AI lens, or even just Plain-Jane F-Mount lens, but definitely not non-AI lens. Because if you did, then with the subsequent introduction of the AI-S lens (short for Auto Indexing-Shutter), shouldn’t the now predecessor AI lens be referred to as non-AI-S lens instead? Fast-forward to the present, should we also collectively call the manual focus lenses as non-AF lenses?

The same thing also happened to Canon, although not too serious. With the advent of the EOS series of Canon cameras in the 1980s, the older manual focus cameras were referred to as non-EOS Canon. Even the lenses didn’t fare any better. The older manual focus lenses were simply referred to as non-EF lenses. Why can’t they just call them Canon FD lenses?

Just like in the movies, the opposite of the good guys are not necessarily the bad guys. They could just have been innocent bystanders… Therefore, you don’t stereotypically label all the non-good guys as the bad guys.

Likewise, if I order ice-cream that isn’t chocolate flavour, I may not necessarily be ordering vanilla flavour. It could be strawberry, corn, yam, or my personal favourite – raspberry ripple. So a non-chocolate ice-cream isn’t necessarily vanilla ice-cream.

It is very sad to note that some professional photographers also refer to the conventional optical/film cameras as analogue cameras. Sadder even still that some local publications put it out on print for the masses to read. Perhaps we should take a stand that optical/film camera isn’t simply an analogue camera, and that capturing images without using a digital camera isn’t analogue photography.