Tofino 1982
I have been experimenting with a photo scanner on some of my old film. This shot fits well with my wooden boat festival series of the past few days (and which will be continued). It was taken in the fall of 1982 (probably September) along the Tofino waterfront which is in Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
The central buildings are the BC Packers fish processing plant, a company that went out of business about 15 years ago. The troller fully visible just beyond the fish plant is the Midway, which apparently is still in service somewhere on the coast, though I don’t know if it is still fishing commercially.
According to this website, she is 32.6 feet by 10.5 feet, built 1927 in Prince Rupert. The website lists her ownership history as:
- 1941 owner: Otto Olson, Prince Rupert
- 1948 owner: Henry Johnsen, Vancouver
- 1953 owner (Van reg.): Mimi Johnson, Vancouver
- 1963 owner: Allan Bjork, Surrey
- 1985 owner: Midway Fishing Ltd, Delta
- 1992 owner: Charles Brayden, Nanaimo
- 2006 owner in Campbell River
Edit: The Transport Canada Vessel Listing for registered vessels show the Midway’s port of registry as Nanaimo, but it’s registry as ‘suspended’. I wonder if that signals the end of this boat.
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Pentax Spotmatic, no surviving exposure or lens information (probably a 50 or 55mm), Ilford Pan-F, scanned from the negative at 600dpi.
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burnt embers 
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I love this photo – the subject really speaks to me, and it works well in black and white. Re: the boat – “suspended” registry may not mean the end of the boat. It may be simple that an owner chose de-registration rather than complying with the federal registry’s requirements re: signage, renewal of registry etc. Or perhaps the boat was sold to a US owner…I’m sure there are other possible reasons for suspension of registry.
BTW, my husband and I used to own a converted 1927 troller, the Willmar II – not dissimilar from the boat in your photo. Our boat had served as a commercial fishboat for a very long time and was well known on the coast, so everywhere we went, someone who’d been in the fishing industry seemed to recognize it and have a story to share. It’s now owned by a fellow from Seattle, who’s done a magnificent job at restoring the boat and, I believe, lives aboard. So it’s no longer registered – and it has a new name – but it’s still in action.
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Hi Laurie – thanks so much for a great comment, and all that useful information too. Lets hope the boat is still active in some guise, and well cared for too!
And I am glad you like this photograph. It is one of the few really good exposures I have found on my black and white negatives, though I have not had a good rummage through them yet. Most black and white was shot for work and ended up with the work archives, so I don’t have a lot to choose from anyway.
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Beautiful detail; I think I still love black & white best.
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I have a real affinity for it. And for the way it looks on film, there is a little extra something about it.
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One of our favorite spots on the island, although I do admit I haven’t been in over 20 years. Great shot!
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Hi Toad – 20 years a go is a lot closer to when this photo was taken than now is, so this shot might be a better representation of what it was like than what it is now. Glad you like it!
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Ah, yes – Tofino. We used to stay out there, when my father was working with his friends from UBC and the local First Nations bands who operated the Thornton Creek Hatchery in Ucluelet. We also worked at the Marine Labs at Bamfield, if you know where that is, which is only a short distance from there but a heckuva long drive by dirt logging road.
I am convinced that this part of the island is one of the most wild and beautiful places on this planet. You are lucky to live nearby!
Watching your images is like a series of still-life shots from my childhood.
Thank you again!
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Hi Sam. Those places are very much part of my world, though my adult life unlike the Friday Harbour Labs. However, I was lucky enough as a kid to hitch a ride on the float plane ride that took the committee to view the options for a marine station on the west coast, including Bamfield. That was interesting to see, the old cable station which still had telegraph tape bundles lying on the floor and other cool features. Later in my working life I lived at the Bamfield Marine Station for 4 months, conducting a project in that area with the Huu-ay-aht First Nation. And this shot is from when I was doing one with the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nation in Clayoquot Sound, also for 4 months, though I came back the next year and did another month or so. I have visited both places many times since, but not now for 5 or 6 years. Past time for another visit.
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beautiful desolation and stillnes!
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Thanks Mark – it is that kind of place, at certain times anyway. This was one of them. Looking at the photo I notice the only thing moving is the boat in the distance which has drawn a perfect line along the water at it’s boundary with the island in the background.
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Are you satisfied with the scan/scanner? Because it sure looks good to me!
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Hi Melinda – I am satisfied with the out come. I am hoping that I can get quicker at getting to that place, and expect that I can. Also, it is a matter of setting things up for a series of similar images and using the settings repeatedly, which I am figuring out still.
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This looks like you were on the water when you shot it, possibly from a boat? The scanner did a nice job, too.
If this was shot in 1982 it’s more than 30 years old. Yet it still resembles very much the style and taste you shoot with today. I’ve noticed this with my own work when I started converting older photos to digital. Maybe we don’t change our vision very much through the years.
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Hi Ken,
It was from a dock near water level (I know this because of the series of shots it is part of).
I too have been noticing that the things which were catching my eye 30 years+ ago are very similar to now. I did not take many good pictures in those days, and very few for pleasure, but what I pointed the camera at still draws my eye. I am hoping my vision does change, but looking at old pictures in the past few weeks has made me wonder.
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That looks like it is scanned well. What type of scanner are you using, Ehpem?
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Hi Andy. It did scan well.
It’s an Epson V700, I have it on a 15 day trial – it is rather pricey though I have a very good deal on it. I had to scan a bunch of older material for a report I am writing and the cost of high quality scans was a significant proportion of the cost of this scanner. I am hoping to be able to use it on other jobs and get some of the value back from it.
The reason I am trying this model is that it is able to set up and scan many images, prints or negatives, but not both at same time, including larger format negatives as well. I am finding the many images at once part to be a bit of a learning curve and not as fast as I imagined since my exposures are often not all that uniform and each one needs a bit of tweaking. But, I have not properly learned how to do it either. I have tried it at very high resolutions (12800dpi) and they work very well, though as one would expect take quite a long time and make an enormous file.
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I’ll be interested to hear how you get on. The big advantage of a flatbed scanner is that it has the capacity to scan all sorts of images (film and print) in a wide range of sizes I bought a second hand Nikon CoolScan (purely for 35mm film) about a year ago but have not not used it greatly – in particular I found it very difficult to control contrast when scanning B&W negs. I think it needs concentrated time to persevere with it – something I’m not very good at allocating. Ken Bello has a Wolverine scanner and has mentioned it in one or two of his posts and it looks like he gets good results with that.
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I have noticed Ken’s discussions of his Wolverine with interest, and his results too. I also was trying photographing with a negative/slide attachment on a bellows unit, but it was tricky, the adapter for my Canon was not square to the attachment and could not be rotated and other obstacles all made it tricky. What I have not really tested yet is the dust removal features for this scanner – it is supposed to be quite good at that, but I have not really figured that bit out yet.
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