Her Eye for Yachts Is No Accident

When Geri Conser’s plane crashed into the ocean four years ago while she was photographing a national yacht race in Newport Beach, she thought her career as an aerial yachting photographer was over. Not only did she lose her cameras, photos and her own plane, which sank in 180 feet of water, she also broke her back.

Since the crash, however, Conser’s back has healed and her photography career has taken off like a high-flying jet. “There seems to be a mystique about someone who crashes in an airplane and survives. So the crash probably helped the business,” says Conser, a licensed pilot who has been photographing boats from the air since 1978.

Conser often flies and shoots at the same time--a task that is fairly simple when photographing a single subject, she says.

For more complex assignments involving many boats, she hires a pilot to fly her Cessna while she snaps photos out the window on the passenger side. That’s what she was doing when her plane went down in August, 1985.

“To this day I am not sure what happened,” Conser says. “We started to come out of a turn and the plane couldn’t come out of it. The next thing I know--bang--we’re in the water. The plane is filling up with water faster than anyone can imagine.”

The plane sank in minutes, about three miles off Newport Beach. “We were in the water 10 or 15 minutes, and a spectator boat came over and picked us up,” says Conser, who suffered a compression fracture of her spine that she says caused her to lose two inches in height.

Six days after getting out of the hospital, she was flying again. “I’m the type that if you fall off a horse, you get right back on,” she says. But even though Conser began flying again, she was not so sure she could revive her aerial photography business, which she runs out of her home in Costa Mesa.

“I thought, ‘This is totally the end of my career,’ ” says Conser, who was 45 at the time of her crash. “I have crashed in a world-class regatta in my own home waters, in front of my yacht club people. I was really embarrassed. I thought I’d quit the business. I thought no one would ever call me again.”

But Conser was wrong. People did call. And eight months later, she was back in the air, photographing the Newport-to-Ensenada yacht race. Since then, Conser’s yacht photography business has grown steadily. During the spring and summer, when most yachting regattas are held, Conser is in the air nearly every weekend photographing events from Santa Barbara to San Diego. Two or three times a year, she travels as far north as San Francisco to photograph boats there.

Most of Conser’s customers are yacht owners who want aerial photos of their boats under full sail. “To boat owners, boats are like children. They can never get enough photos of them,” says Conser, who recalls that one owner hired her for a two-hour session that used 10 rolls of film and cost nearly $1,000. Most private photo shoots take much less time and cost anywhere from $300 to $500, Conser says.

In addition to private shoots, she often photographs yachting regattas on speculation, hoping that she can sell her pictures to boat owners once they see the final, full-color product. And often a yacht club will hire Conser to shoot an event. “I just did a job for the San Diego Yacht Club,” she says. “They wanted to give every person in the race an 8-by-10 photo of their boat as a participation trophy. There were 57 boats, and I had to photograph them in two days.”

Conser says the hardest part about aerial photography is neither the flying nor the photographing--it’s the cataloguing and organizing of the thousands of photos she takes each year. “This year I’ve probably shot 12,000 to 15,000 images,” she says. “I may shoot 50 rolls of film at a regatta. Then I take them to a processor that day, get them back, sort them and put them on the board for the racers to see when they get back to the clubhouse for the trophy presentation.”

Conser’s photos often end up in yachting magazines and in photo exhibits in Orange County. She recently had a display of prints on view at the Art-A-Fair in Laguna Beach. “During the last four years, my career has snowballed,” she says.

Conser is a self-taught photographer who got her first camera in the early 1970s. When she decided to become a professional photographer, she turned to boats and began carving out a niche for herself.

“My husband and I had been in the marine business for 20 years,” she says, “so photographing boats seemed natural.”

In the beginning, Conser took her pictures the hard way--from land or from other boats. She remembers perching on a navigational marker once in the middle of a lake and taking photos of a boat as it sailed by. And she recalls climbing a cliff to gain a good vantage point for another photo. “I thought there must be a better way of doing this,” she recalls.

For Conser, the better way was flying. So in 1973 she started taking flying lessons. “In the air, you get a real aesthetic view. I thought this is great. No more taking pictures from a navigational marker.”

Conser now owns a Cessna 150, which she keeps at John Wayne Airport. Despite her crash, she has developed no fear of flying. “I can see myself still taking pictures for another 20 years. I love flying and I love being on the water.”

Shearlean Duke is a regular contributor to Orange County Life. On the Waterfront appears each Saturday, covering boating life styles as well as ocean-related activities along the county’s 42-mile coastline. Send information about boating-related events to: On the Waterfront, Orange County Life, The Times, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626. Deadline is two weeks before publication. Story ideas are also welcome.