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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.

The two men met in 1977 and started the Marine Life Sanctuary Society 12 years later to establish protected areas along the coast. But they can't help but be disappointed with the results. In British Columbia, conservation interests often play caboose to commercial fishing, sport fishing and first nations lobbies.

"We really need a beneficent dictator here," Mr. Hanby jokes. "We got nowhere with the government."

At one time, Mr. Hanby rarely saw a fish beyond the end of a hook. He'd been an avid fisherman growing up in northern England and was eager to angle the famous Thames River flowing through London. In 1953, when he finally laid eyes on the Thames as a 19-year-old in the Royal Air Force, he was horrified.

"It was so thick and so black it looked like you could carve out a piece and load it into the ferry. Now they supposedly have salmon in the Thames, but why must we lose a resource before we protect it?"

Back at the conference, Mr. Hanby finally cornered a camera sales rep after dealing with fans for two hours. Passersby began photographing the underwater messiah as he considered a shiny digital camera in his wizened hands.

For decades, Mr. Hanby has slung two or three cameras around his neck before slipping beneath the sea. "I need a bloody truck to carry all my gear," he said.

The salesman tells him that one digital will take up to 500 shots, compared to 112 frames for three film cameras.

He came away convinced but empty-handed.

"It may be time," he said. "Maybe I can take four years to do a book rather than 25."

Changing underwater landscapes

Legendary underwater photographer Bernie Hanby has taken more than 20,000 pictures of living creatures off the coast of British Columbia. Now, the co-founder of the Marine Life Sanctuary Society travels the province delivering a slide show with a conservationist message.

Steep Island, near Campbell River. "When I'm doing slide-show presentations, I show a wide-angle picture taken around Steep Island and ask the audience, 'What's wrong with this picture?' It's easy. There's not a single fish in it."

Howe Sound. "Boccacio rockfish were once a staple of the sport fishery in Howe Sound, according to the literature. The Sound used to be solid with them. But I don't have a single Boccacio photograph. They simply don't inhabit that area any more."

Stubbs Island. "I used to take pictures of 10 or 12 rockfish species there at one time. It's a desert now. Everything has been wiped out by the sport fishing and the commercial rockfish industry."

Nelson Rock, outside Pender Harbour. In 1984, Mr. Hanby shot a frame of a school of 10 rockfish off the reef. "I challenge anyone to duplicate that photo today," he said. "It can't be done."

Whytecliffe Marine Park, Vancouver. "In the sixties, they used to collect species for the Vancouver Aquarium there. I wouldn't even consider going to Whytecliff for photography any more."