California Coast & Ocean

In July 2007, at the suggestion of the editor of this magazine, I sat down with my friends Ken and Gabrielle Adelman to reflect upon the success of the California Coastal Records Project’s aerial photography website at www.californiacoastline.org. We met at the Adelmans’ comfortable, sun-filled solar-powered home in Pajaro Valley, in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and talked about their love of flying and photography and how they came together in an ongoing and uniquely valuable project.

Q: What prompted you to take on the California Coastal Records Project?

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.

Q: What happened next?

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.

Q: What is the process? How do you photograph the coast?

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.

Q: What was the impact of the lawsuit that Barbra Streisand filed against you? [She claimed her privacy had been invaded because her blufftop home in Malibu was in a photograph.]

KA: What was she thinking? We were just blown away. When her lawyers first demanded we take the website off the Internet, we specifically told them this was a public beach survey and educational project protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. We told them no one ever used our website to view her home in Malibu. We reminded them of all the other websites showing photos of the house. We even provided them a copy of the press release we would send out if they filed a lawsuit, saying “Streisand Sues Environmental Education Project.”

We were dumbfounded when they went ahead and filed the lawsuit. It led to hundreds of news stories and pictures of her house being shown worldwide. She really shot herself in the foot on that one.

We hired Richard Kendall, a great Constitutional lawyer out of Los Angeles. He eventually won the case and had Streisand declared a “vexacious” and “malicious” litigant for initiating a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) suit against us.

The court found that Streisand had no right to privacy for what in effect was the arrangement of her deck chairs, and required her to pay us hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs and attorney fees.

It was important that we prevailed, not just because of Streisand, but for all the private property owners along the coast opposed to the project and for other people wanting to do public interest photographic work.

The legal papers are posted on our website, and any activist ever threatened with a SLAPP suit is welcome to visit and read those documents.

Q: What is the story behind the older photos of the coast on the website, from 1972, 1979, 1987, and 1989?

KA: That is an interesting story. The California Department of Boating and Waterways had been doing periodic photo surveys of the coast using overhead slide film from airplanes. Gary Griggs, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at U.C. Santa Cruz, had been caretaking the photos, but many were deteriorating, as slide film does over the years. Gary had been using the pictures for his research projects and with his students but contacted us to see if they could be scanned and put on the website for the public to view.

The whole story is on the website, but suffice it to say the photos had gotten somewhat mixed up over the years, many were degraded, and they were not indexed or sorted by longitude and latitude. We literally had to go picture by picture, mile by mile. I bought a slide scanner and scanned them 25 at a time.

To be able to compare the older slides with the more recent pictures is amazing. We didn’t even know they existed. They were sitting in cardboard boxes in Gary’s office.

Q: What have you learned from the project?

GA: We’ve learned that the coast is eroding very quickly, and that despite the erosion and sea rise, people continue to want to build along the very edge of the coast. You can really see it from the air. Some places you think are protected, like Santa Cruz, are almost entirely fortified with seawalls.

Q: Do you plan to continue with the project?

KA: Forever. We can’t stop now, it is our life’s work. I didn’t plan on this, it found us.

GA: I’ve written a short children’s story about the project. We look forward to seeing all the ways in which the website can be used in the future, ways we haven’t even thought of yet. It exists for everyone, and everyone is encouraged to participate.

KA: It has been an interesting journey because of all the great people we’ve met along the way. We have really enjoyed assisting small environmental organizations improve their ability to do their work and be successful.

The Adelmans have agreed to donate all revenues from the project to the California Coastal Protection Network (www.coastaladvocates.com).

Mark Massara is a public interest environmental attorney specializing in California coastal zone land use, development, beach access, and resource protection legal issues, and has been director of Sierra Club’s coastal programs for 15 years.