The Town That Kept Calling Back

The Town of Golden Beach called me to make a public safety video.

That was five years ago. Since then I’ve filmed their 95th anniversary, the ribbon cutting on their new town hall, and an eight-foot aerial photograph that now hangs in the town manager’s office.

Where it started

Golden Beach is 961 people and 364 houses on a barrier island between the Intracoastal and the Atlantic. It runs its own police department — which, for a town that size, tells you most of what you need to know about how seriously it takes itself.

The first project was a public-safety PSA with Mayor Glenn Singer. We filmed the Mayor at the Beach Pavilion, then spent time with the Golden Beach Police Department capturing the people, the vehicles and the places behind the message. I flew the town by drone and built the film out of all of it.

That first project led to another. And then another.

Watching the town change

Over the following years I got to document Golden Beach from a perspective most people never get.

For the town’s 95th anniversary, we built a film around the staff and community, filmed in the locations where they actually work. One of the people I interviewed was 103 years old and had lived there most of her life.

Her story gave the film something I couldn’t have manufactured: a living connection between the Golden Beach of decades ago and the community it had become.

Watch the 95th anniversary film →

During those same years I watched the town’s new civic headquarters take shape. I was working with the team before they moved in, filmed around the building as it came together, and eventually documented the inauguration and ribbon cutting — a full crowd, an enormous American flag suspended from a crane, Rabbi Chay Amar speaking.

There was something meaningful about documenting not just a finished building, but the transition into it.

Then came a very different request

One day the team called with something unusual. They wanted a single aerial photograph of the entire Town of Golden Beach, to hang in Town Manager Alexander Diaz’s office.

A normal drone photograph wasn’t going to do it.

Golden Beach runs about a mile and a quarter north to south and is very narrow. Shot from an angle, I could make a beautiful image, but parts of the town disappeared behind other parts. Straight down, I couldn’t fit it in a frame at any altitude that kept the houses legible — and climbing high enough to fit it turned the town into a smear with a road through it.

What they wanted was closer to an aerial map, with the resolution and quality of a photograph.

So I stopped trying to take one picture and built one instead.

Photographing an entire town

I flew a planned pattern over Golden Beach, photographing it in overlapping rows, north end to south end. Forty-five individual frames, none of which was a photograph of anything.

Then came the hard part.

I used Google Earth to plan and check the coverage, and Lightroom for the frames themselves. At forty-five frames, small inconsistencies become big problems. Roads don’t quite line up. Buildings distort at the edges. Water changes between frames and gives the software nothing to hold onto.

Over the following weeks I kept refining it. My sister, Rikki Gurewicz, a graphic artist, took it into Photoshop and repaired the areas that needed detailed work by hand.

Eventually all of those individual photographs became one continuous aerial portrait of the town.

From drone to eight-foot print

Once the image was finished, the town asked if I could help produce it physically too. I coordinated with FASTSIGNS to turn the final file into a print roughly eight feet wide.

Today it hangs in Alexander Diaz’s office at the new Town Center.

And that’s my favorite part of the whole thing.

Not because it’s the biggest photograph I’ve made. Because it represents years with the same community — standing beside the pavilion filming a safety PSA, riding along with the police department, interviewing longtime residents, documenting an anniversary and a new civic headquarters, and finally photographing the town itself from above.

Working alongside Rabbi Amar over those same years, I got to see the place from the inside rather than as a crew that shows up and leaves.

I’ve seen Golden Beach from the ground and from the air, through its residents, its leadership, its police department and its community events. It’s been an honor to document a small piece of its story.