Professor Gary Griggs alerted us to a set of coastal photographs in the custody of the Santa Cruz County Surveyor's Office of the Santa Cruz County coastline that could be available for scanning. Although we are normally only interested in complete or near-complete sets of coastal photographs, the large span of time shown in these photographs was intriguing; the oldest was shot in 1928. Carl Rom in the Surveyor's Office was kind enough to gather all the photos that he thought may be of interest and loaned these priceless archives to us to scan. We used our EPSON Expression 10000XL at 600 dpi again, and did the scanning in two weeks. There are a total of 191 photographs.
No maps came with the photographs; the only location information was an occasional label to a set of photographs, such as "Waddell Beach." Similar to the Coastal Conservancy photographs, position information was generated by comparing the photographs to modern-day Google Earth images; however, each position was hand-encoded, since, with no maps, we didn't know if we could interpolate positions. Our familiarity with the County we live in from the air was a necessary part of finding locations for these often completely-unlabeled photographs. This and the encoding of the dates was completed on one long, rainy day. As with the Coastal Conservancy photographs, some photographs are of inland areas and are not displayed directly, but can be accessed through position markers in our Google Earth .kmz file. Also, some of the 1928 photographs appear to be copies of others; the ones we deemed original (except for one that is of lesser extent than its copy) are displayed, and the others are accessed as above.
Perhaps because they were intended to aid in County planning, and needed to look like blueprints, all the photographs (even those taken in the 90's) are in black and white. Some were commissioned by the USDA during WWII, presumably to map the County's farms and aid in estimating the agricultural potential of the area. The photographs taken in 1928 occasionally were in stereo pairs. Many had simply sat for years and years in the County's files, their original purpose unknown.
Only the photographs that extended the timescale of the website are displayed; imagery from the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's was scanned and can be made available on request. We hope that with their new accessibility that the efforts of these pilots and photographers of the past will find a new purpose.