Stereophotographs of the sea surface, acquired during the Tower Ocean Wave and Radar Dependence experiment (TOWARD), are analyzed to yield directional wave height spectra of short surface waves in the 6- to 80-cm range. The omnidirectional wave height spectra are found to deviate from the k-4 distribution, where k is the wave number. The stereo data processing errors are found to be within ¿5%. The omnidirectional spectra yield 514 degrees of freedom for 30-cm-long waves. The directional distribution of short waves is processed with a directional resolution of 30¿, so as to yield 72 degrees of freedom for 30-cm-long waves. The directional distributions show peaks that are aligned with the wind and swell directions. It is found that dynamically relevant measurements can be obtained with stereophotography, after removal of the mean surface associated with long waves. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1988