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Friday Slide Show: Mission Creek
10 June 2016
Last week it was glass houses. This week it's houseboats. And condos. On a creek shadowed by the concrete of freeways. Just a few steps from the ballpark, in fact.
There's some poetry in there somewhere. And if we were swaying in a hammock on the porch of our houseboat as the tide lifted us eight feet, it might come to us.
But we were out for a walk along the nicely paved path on the north side of the creek. And all we had with us was a camera. So we lined up a few shots of the houseboats.
The path is nicely paved because the whole area around it has been developed into condominiums. They're nothing to look at. And they aren't cheap either.
On the south side of the creek, where the houseboats were moved in the 1960s from Islais Creek further south, there's quite a bit of development, too. Mission Bay with UCSF's new campus and Kaiser have transformed the landscape.
Our zoom lens was a little short for anything but real estate photos of the houseboats.
Development has just barely been resisted by the Dogpatch neighborhood to the south of that. And the little community of houseboats on Mission Creek right in the middle of things.
We used to go down there when we were working at the magazine downtown. There was a little red hut sitting on a dock attached to the street that served lunch. Blanche ran the place. And named it after herself. She was, according to legend, formerly a legal secretary who had enough of baloney and decided to make her money serving an honest lunch.
You could do that in this town then.
Now there's just the rotted boards of the old dock left of the place. It isn't safe to walk on it any more. And there's some poetry in that, too, we suspect.
Our zoom lens was a little short for anything but real estate photos of the houseboats. We could have cropped the images tight for more detail but that felt a bit intrusive. It was enough for us to see these quirky contraptions standing in front of the tall metal and steel buildings behind them.
You walk along the paved path until the freeways cross the creek high overhead. They are a graceful conclusion to the exercise if not poetry.
They make a tough shot, though. And even the new Guided Upright tool, which is not as clearly implemented in Lightroom as it is in Photoshop (just draw on your guide lines on the image), isn't much help in curing the images of distortion. The freeways seems to insist on being distorted. They look better that way.
Not so the houseboats. They were easily righted with the Upright tool running in Auto mode. Poetry there, too, no doubt.
May they float forever.
