Going Analog: From Tiny Cameras to Flying Food by Piotr Gregorczyk

My daughter dropped a line on me recently that felt both trendy and oddly reassuring: her generation is “going analog.”

We were sitting in a neighborhood restaurant, the kind of place that lands comfortably between fancy and familiar, where the lighting flatters everyone and the menu doesn’t require a glossary. Across from us, a young woman was carefully photographing her meal. Nothing unusual there, except for one detail. She wasn’t using her phone.

She had this tiny camera. Not vintage Leica cool, not influencer-level gear. More like something you’d once grab at Staples or Best Buy on a whim. Meanwhile, her iPhone sat right there on the table, perfectly capable and completely ignored.

I must have looked confused, because my daughter just smiled and said, “It’s cute. She’s going analog.”

And just like that, I was introduced to a whole mindset.

Going analog, apparently, is less about nostalgia and more about survival. It is about dialing down digital anxiety by swapping screens for something you can actually hold. Paper planners instead of apps. Vinyl instead of playlists. Film cameras instead of endless camera roll clutter. Even hobbies that sound like they belong to someone’s grandmother, like knitting or sketching, are suddenly back in style.

At first, I thought, ” That’s… kind of odd.

But then it clicked.

Something is refreshing about choosing friction. About accepting imperfections. About not instantly editing, filtering, posting, and performing every moment. That girl with the tiny camera was not just taking a photo. She was slowing the moment down, making it intentional.

And that thought followed me straight into the world of food photography.

Because while some people are stepping away from digital overload, others are pushing creativity in a way that still feels surprisingly… analog at heart.

Take Piotr Gregorczyk, for example.

This London-based, award-winning photographer has built entire campaigns around what can only be described as controlled chaos. His signature style? Food suspended mid-air, caught in that perfect split second where gravity seems to have taken a coffee break. Burgers explode, sauces splash, ingredients hover like they are auditioning for a zero-gravity cooking show.

Shot with lightning-fast shutter speeds, his work captures motion you would normally miss entirely. It is messy, it is playful, and somehow, it still makes everything look ridiculously appetizing. No small feat when your salad is literally flying across the frame.

What I love most is that, despite how surreal it looks, it is not purely digital trickery. Gregorczyk has said his process is roughly 60 percent real, 40 percent digital. That means a lot of what you see actually happened in a studio. Someone really did toss that food. Someone really had to clean it up afterward.

Yes, there is some post-production magic involved, and sure, a little “cheating” is part of the craft. But the foundation is physical. Tangible. Imperfect. In other words, a little bit analog.

And maybe that is the connection.

Whether it is a young woman choosing a tiny camera over her iPhone or a photographer launching ingredients into mid-air to capture something unforgettable, there is a shared instinct at play. A desire to create something real before polishing it. To experience the moment before optimizing it.

To me, Gregorczyk’s work looks like a room where gravity has simply given up, a delicious explosion of food gone completely berserk. But underneath all that chaos is intention, patience, and a hands-on approach that no algorithm can fully replicate.

So maybe my daughter is onto something.

Maybe “going analog” is not about rejecting technology. It is about reclaiming a bit of humanity in how we use it.