Stone Lagoon Breach Vertical Photography

A Study for the US Army Corp of Engineers

See "Shore and Beach" Article

Photograph copyright Gary Todoroff 2007, All rights reserved

Five photographs of Stone Lagoon were taken with a Hasselblad ELM with Zeiss 100mm f3.5 lens in a vertical mount on a Cessna 182. The five 6x6cm transparencies were taken with about 25 percent overlap. Each photo was scanned with an Imacon Flextight Photo at 3200ppi and merged into a panoramic with PanaVue ImageAssembler software.

The two-lane highway (US101) at the right makes a good visual scale reference. The Pacific Ocean breaks through the narrow spit of Stone Lagoon every few years when high tides and storm surges coincide. The normally fresh-water lagoon is located about forty miles north of Eureka, California.

The complete study of the barrier breaching process included photographs taken over the course of a month with four flights. The weekly photographs provided data for the Army Corp of Engineers to study the dynamics of the tidal breaching of an ocean lagoon. See the published article with time-rectified photographs at:

http://www.northcoastphotos.com/publish2.html - a link at the bottom of the page displays the complete published technical article in pdf format.