Fishing the West Coast Photography Contest Winners Announced

General Category Winner: “Mystic Fish Fleet” by Blair Govan

Thanks to everyone who submitted photographs for the Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society’s 2018 Fishing the West Coast Photography Contest.  The annual contest is not only a fun way to showcase the talents of our local photographers and the beauty of our west coast fishing locales; it also allows the Society to record today’s commercial fishing industry in our archives for future generations. At the end of each contest, all submitted photographs are added to the Society’s archive collections to document the stories and activities relating to Canada’s west coast fishing industry for the past year.

This year, we took a different approach to selecting winners. The General Category and Feature Category winning photographs were selected by a panel of judges, and the People’s Choice was selected by online voting.

The General Category winner, shown above, is Mystic Fish Fleet by Blair Govan, capturing a beautiful sunset scene in Steveston Harbour.

People’s Choice Winner: “Misty Harbour” by Pete Jansen

People’s Choice Winner is Misty Harbour, by Pete Jansen, taken on a typical west coast foggy day.

Feature Category “The Big Run” Winner:  “Flying Salmon on the West Coast” by Ben Whiting

The Feature Category this year is “The Big Run” to capture scenes of the big sockeye salmon run that returns to the west coast every four years. Ben Whiting’s perfectly-timed photo of a salmon in mid-air was selected as the winner of this category.

“There were a lot of great photographs submitted this year that really capture the essence of today’s fishing industry, which is one of the main goals of this contest,” says Heidi Rampfl, the Society’s Collections Manager. “In 10, 20, 50 years when people are looking at our collection, they should be able to look at these photographs and get a sense of what the industry was like in 2018.”

The top three photos of each category are on display in the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site until April 2019. You can see all of the submitted photos on the contest website, or on the digital display in the Cannery gift shop.

In the meantime, for those of you in the west coast fishing industry, or those who capture images relating to commercial fishing in our corner of the world, look for 2019 contest applications to open in the Fall, and we may see your photo in next year’s exhibit.