For Nigel Robertson, a picture is worth a thousand words, and a lot of work.
The Cowichan Valley resident has taken on an ambitious project that involves restoring hundreds of vintage photos of Duncan and Lake Cowichan.
Robertson has always been fascinated with small-town life and after some time living on the mainland, he moved home and started a side business digitizing old media like cassettes and video tapes.
“That’s where the photo restoration and colorization started,” says Robertson. After COVID though, business dried up and he found himself with lots of free time. In a bout of late-night googling, he stumbled across an AI that could upscale, colorize and restore faces in old photos. “I’m shocked at what it can do, if I didn’t have that software I’d be lost,” says Roberston “It can be used for good, or it can be used for destruction.” In this case, AI helps undo some of the destruction time has left on these photos.
“It’s like a piece of music or like or like a fine dish. You have a vision in your mind of how you want to look, and you, you’re bound, determined to just sit there and get it.
Robertson has amassed a large collection of old photos from people all over the Cowichan Valley and has been slowly uploading the restored version to the photo-sharing website Flickr.
Anyone can send Robertson photos to restore and every album on Flickr is available for anyone to download for free.
The photos cover a wide swath of the Cowichan Valley from Duncan to Cowichan Bay and Lake Cowichan, covering 1924 to around the 1980s.
