Channel between Kemah and Seabrook, 1992. A fine art photograph by Ruth Burke.
The Draw Bridge that extended over the Clear Creek Channel that fed into Galveston Bay, known as the Kemah-Seabrook Draw Bridge, was the reason for many of my early Seabrook and Kemah waterfront photographs. The bridge would open frequently especially on the weekend to allow the sailboats to pass thru. I would use the time when the bridge was open to get out of my car and photograph the boats as they passed under the bridge. It was an expansive vantage point above the waterfronts of Seabrook and Kemah looking into Galveston Bay with shrimp boats docked on each side in front of popular seafood restaurants and a parade of sail and power boats in the channel. The draw bridge was replaced in 1986 with a fixed-span bridge. This ended the opportunity to photograph the sailboats as they circled and then filed in a straight line to go under the open draw bridge one by one.
The new bridge was higher and offered an even greater expansive birds-eye view of the Seabrook waterfront and Kemah Boardwalk area with popular restaurants, hang-outs and dives lining both sides. As time passed, I would look for beautiful times of the year to capture the ever changing waterfront scenes of these two cities on the Clear Creek Channel.
