Tuesday, February 14, 2006

45,000 Photographs of the California Coastline

In the process of avoiding work, I decided to drop in on www.californiacoastline.org, a project run by my friends Ken and Gabrielle Adelman. They have been taking photos of the California coastline for several years now, from a low-flying helicopter, documenting changes on the coast, both natural and man-made. They are nearing their 30,000th photo, and have added several photo databases extending back to 1972. They're most famous for having been sued by Barbra Streisand (they won), but the point is how human activity affects the coast, not who the people are and how fancy the houses are. Not that I contributed anything to the project, but I got to tag along on one short flight. Interesting work.

I would love to see a complementary set of ground-level photos of this, or any other, area (say, the town of Half Moon Bay), that resulted in a 3-D dataset showing how the town has evolved over the last century.

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