Bob Dylan went electric. Wayne Gretzky went aluminum.
And now, ambling past booths and fish tanks at a scuba diving conference at the Vancouver Aquarium, legendary underwater photographer Bernie Hanby is considering a switch to digital.
"It may be time to break out of the mould," he said, loping toward an Olympus camera booth. Before he could make it there, a few dozen attendees wanted a word, a handshake, an autograph - often all three. Olympus could wait.
One admirer held out a pen and a copy of Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest, the book it took Mr. Hanby and biologist Andy Lamb 25 years, 4,000 dives and tens of thousands of strobe flashes to complete. "We're going to laminate every page of this one," said the autograph-seeker, Sheryl Mass, a dive tour operator. "That way we won't have to worry about it getting wet on the boat."
Sensing that the adulation might sidetrack him, the 74-year-old film photographer turned to his friend, Mr. Lamb. "Don't let me leave here without talking to those Olympus people."
Mr. Lamb snickered and leaned toward an acquaintance. "He's a dinosaur, a living dinosaur," he said, just loud enough for Mr. Hanby to hear. "We might just witness a momentous occasion today."
Up until 35 years ago, Mr. Hanby was an insurance adjuster and amateur photographer. Then he found scuba diving. He has since snapped more than 20,000 frames of virtually every living thing that swims, crawls or sways off the B.C. coast. By now, that collection probably comprises the world's most complete photographic archive of underwater life along a stretch of coastline that Jacques Cousteau once anointed the world's best diving waters second only to the Red Sea.
"It's a little too obsessive to call a hobby," said Mr. Hanby, now retired from the insurance business. "My wife still complains."
February is prime diving season in British Columbia, but Mr. Hanby hasn't been out on a serious trip in months. His boat is under repair, his wife is sick and he's frankly a little nervous about what he might find when he gets wet again. His underwater tableau has changed dramatically since he started preserving it on film.
The schools of 90-year-old vermilion rockfish and 80-pound lingcod he once shot with regularity are gone, and without a sliver of the outcry that surrounded the cod collapse on the East Coast and dwindling salmon stocks on the West Coast.
"What we have got left is a shell of what we used to have," he said outside a burbling aquarium of yelloweyes and quillbacks.
As an illustration of the decline, Mr. Hanby often pulls out a photo taken off Nelson Rock near Pender Harbour, B.C., that shows a school of 10 yelloweye rockfish nosing toward the lens.
"I challenge anyone to duplicate that photo today," he said. "It can't be done. I remember diving in the eighties when rockfish would come everywhere to look at you. They were curious. Well, all those have disappeared."
Lacking the safety of numbers, rockfish tend to become camera-shy. "They get nervous," said Mr. Hanby, "and a lot more difficult to photograph."
It's a familiar refrain among this conference of divers who often witness species loss through their goggles long before marine scientists predict it.
"Twenty-five years ago, I couldn't see the surface for rockfish," said Mr. Lamb. "You literally looked up and the sun was blocked out."
At the same time, the two men have noticed growing numbers of unfamiliar critters that have migrated to B.C.'s shores in cargo-ship ballasts: European green shore crabs, purple mahogany clams and foreign tunicates.
That's not the end of it.
"With global warming, there's some evidence we'll be seeing manta rays and other strange things here," says Mr. Lamb. "Who knows?"
Mr. Hanby and Mr. Lamb have criss-crossed the province delivering a slide show with this conservationist bent.
