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Saving the Coast with Pictures |
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Gabrielle Adelman: We acquired our first helicopter in 1996. Ken had long been interested in photography and had significant experience with color negative slide film. We quickly realized that oblique photos from the helicopter had significant advantages over the standard overhead pictures commonly taken from an airplane, and also complimentary uses. We then contacted many environmental groups offering to take photographs, including the Sierra Club. Soon you called us, asking for pictures of the Hearst Ranch in San Simeon, 18 miles of coastline and 80,000 acres proposed for golf and resort development in 1998. Due to Hearst Ranch being private, most people had never really seen how beautiful this part of the California coast was. We flew the helicopter over the entire ranch and Gary Lynch shot color negative slide film. Sierra Club then used the pictures at public meetings in Patagonia, Inc. stores and at locations throughout California, showing the ranch to thousands of people for the first time. The Hearst project was subsequently denied by the California Coastal Commission. It was you, Mark, who first suggested we shoot the entire coast. At the time, Ken and I were still working full-time and digital photography had not yet evolved sufficiently to make such a project possible. Ken had estimated that it would require over 12,000 slides to photograph the entire coast. Thus the organizing and scanning to get them on the web was a significant hurdle. Ken Adelman: As we flew the coast we became convinced of the value of the project. Flying raised many questions for us--we saw bulldozers on the beach, riprap rock seawalls being constructed in the surf, and seemingly inappropriate, incoherent oceanfront construction projects. We thought that if people could only see this stuff from the sky, they would be motivated to move back and appreciate the need to protect these vanishing resources. In 2001 I started using digital photography equipment, just at the time it was becoming feasible to do so. I acquired a Nikon D1x and used that camera for the first coastal flyover in 2002 and much of the second. In October 2005 I upgraded to a Nikon D2x, and the improvements were dramatic. You can see the difference at the “About the Project” page of the website, along with pictures of the helicopter and “crew.” For a detailed description of the effort over the five years of the project’s life, check out the “Project Diary” page. Our vision was to take a baseline set of pictures for use by the Sierra Club and Coastal Commission enforcement staff. In the beginning, we had no “website” vision. We really didn’t appreciate the level of interest amongst the general public for pictures like these. We initially shot pictures of seawalls in Santa Cruz, oceanfront areas proposed for development, the unpermitted seawall at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Half Moon Bay, and the Del Monte Monterey pine forests at the Pebble Beach Club. We just started doing more and more. Data organization was a challenge. I began to conceive of a private website for the Sierra Club just to organize and store the pictures. We completed the first leg of shooting the entire coastline in 2002, and that effort is described on the website in the “Project Diary” page. You’ll see we had all kinds of problems and hurdles, from fog in Big Sur to onboard computer problems. I had designed the project to shoot pictures directly into an Apple computer, which would be powered by the helicopter. The inverter in the helicopter failed and so then did the computer. |
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