California Coast & Ocean

KA: Gabrielle flies while I shoot pictures. We have become very experienced at looking for the very best weather conditions. We do it in sections. It initially took four or five trips to shoot the North Coast. There were gaps due to fog and darkness. That first trip we shot all the way up to Crescent City, and stumbled into a great fish restaurant down by the harbor.

We had to make some arbitrary decisions about what you consider the “coast” for purposes of the project. We have not shot the entire San Francisco Bay, and we have not gone far up rivers, watersheds, or deep into some of the larger salt flats, etc.

We’ve discovered that there are two places you must shoot in the morning because of the sun--the east side of Año Nuevo State Park and the west side of Tomales Bay.

To date I would estimate we’ve flown over 4,000 miles of coast, with over 120 hours of flying time. Our first trip took over 50 hours, 25 hours taking pictures and 25 hours getting back home.

After shooting the entire coast in 2002, we did it again in 2005, and have shot parts a third time in 2006.

In general, we aim for pictures consisting of 90 percent coast and 10 percent water. People are now asking for pictures of kelp cover, inland watershed areas, and mountaintop photos.

We’ve also taken on a number of special location-specific projects, including conversion of redwood forests to vineyards in the Gualala River watershed in Sonoma and photographing the efforts of property owners at Broad Beach in Malibu to prevent public beach access.

All requests for special projects and any questions regarding the website are handled through Susan Jordan at the California Coastal Protection Network (CPN) organization. The intent has always been to use the website to further coastal protection efforts of nonprofit organizations in California.

Q: What is the most amazing thing you’ve seen?

GA: The Mexican border is the most incredible photo, with that awful rusting fence constructed by the INS running right through the middle of Friendship Plaza and out into the ocean.

Q: What has been the biggest challenge?

KA: We have repeatedly tried to work with Vandenberg Air Force Base, north of Lompoc, without success. They are the only military property on the entire coast that has refused to allow us to photograph their coastal property. Vandenberg remains the only section of the coast that we have not photographed. Ironically, photographs of that part of the coastline are already available through older pictures provided to us by the State of California, that are posted on the website as part of the 1979 coastal survey.

Q: What is your greatest satisfaction from the project?

GA: Providing public access to all these beautiful yet inaccessible public coastal places. Parts of Malibu, Point Conception, much of the Lost Coast--these are places that most people had never seen and won’t ever have the chance to visit. Now they visit anytime.

Q: What is your greatest regret?

KA: Not having done the project earlier. Not yet having been able to photograph Vandenberg Air Force Base, one of the most beautiful stretches of the California Coast.

Q: Do you do the whole project yourselves or do you have a team of assistants?

GA: Like any impossible task, you look back and think it was easy. But Ken had to actually write the software for the website, and do it in a way that would sort photos geographically along the coast, and make them possible for users to find.

KA: I built the website at home, on PC hardware, running FreeBSD. We use four public Internet servers that are located offsite around the country. We usually have around 100,000 visitors per month. We’re linked extensively now to other private and public websites across the world. We’ve had over 50,000 hits a month from users of the California State Parks website. [That website has a photo link from each coastal park page to the corresponding Coastal Records Project photos.] People use it from Craigslist and numerous other sites.