August 24, 2010

• PhotoPost: Naples Island, Long Beach, CA.

  

  This is my first PhotoPost of new pictures since December of 2009 and contains 20 high quality photos. These photos originate in my Webshots Gallery Folder called "Naples Island", which contains all 203 photos. Well, 202 photos and the above title card, which is a composite consisting of three elements. (The gondola and the title are from other photos.) I visited Naples Island on Saturday, August 21. I got there at about noon, and spent three hours walking around the island taking photos. I'm quite pleased at a lot of these, and hope you enjoy your tour of Naples Island on a hot summer day in SoCal.

  

  We begin on Ocean Blvd. at Bluff Park outside of the metropolitan city of Long Beach, CA., the fifth largest city in the State of California. Here is the "Lone Sailor Memorial" statue, shot from the back, as he is forever looking out at sea. (Well, into the Long Beach harbor anyway.) He is a replica of the original, which stands in the Navy Memorial amphitheater in Washington D.C., and was created by artist Stanley Bleifeld. It was placed on the bluff on October 13, 2004, the 229th anniversary of the creation of the United States Navy. There are other replicas of the original statue, but this is the only one actually looking out to sea.

  

  This is a shot of of one of the "oil islands" in the Long Beach harbor. There are four, named after four astronauts who lost their lives in the space program. (Grissom, White, Chaffee, and Freeman.) Long Beach's Wilmington Field is one of the top five largest oil reservoirs in North America. In the 30s, oil derricks lined the coastline for as far as the eye could see. The oil islands are man made offshore oil drilling islands, built in 1966 and each contains about 200-300 wells. There are control panels I've designed and our company has built on those islands! 

  

  Bicyclists were out in force on Saturday. Here a group of them pass a jogger. It was pretty hot, even at the beach. The bikeways in SoCal run along a lot of beaches, stretching up to Santa Monica in the north. Sometimes, it's almost like a freeway, and you have to wait for long periods of time before daring to "cross the street". I had to wait a few minutes before getting to the south side of this particular bikeway to snap this photo.

  

  A closeup shot of the first oil island with a sailboat passing by. I shot this with a variable zoom lens attachment on my Sony Cybershot camera. I possibly could have tweaked the photo a bit to darken it in the Picture Publisher but I didn't. All these photos appear as they came out of the camera. Even close up, you couldn't tell that this island pumps oil. A derrick is disquised as a "condo" and matches some of the condo buildings on Ocean Blvd. I've linked to a very interesting documentary by Hewell Houser at the end of the PhotoPost concerning these islands.

  

  Driving west on Ocean, I was headed toward Naples Island. I stopped on a side street and parked my car, so I could get a few shots of the island from the mainland. I saw quite a few classic cars. SoCal is part of the "car culture" and even these days, there are dozens of beautiful specimens on the road. On Saturday, I saw a 32 Ford "Deuce coupe" hot rod, a late teens Model T Ford, an assortment of Harleys, and this beautiful late 40s Cadillac Coupe. (It was for sale, too. My mouth was watering.)

  

  I walked along the East Bayshore Walk and got some shots of Naples from the south. Lots of beachgoers were out, some with their boats. When one thinks of Southern California beach towns modeled on Italian cities with canals, Venice Beach comes immediately to mind. Naples is composed of three man made islands bisected by a circular canal with a small straight canal. 2nd Street speeds traffic across the island. It was created in 1903 as a development project meant to mimic Venice Beach to the north. The suburb of Long Beach is known not only for the canals, but for gondola rentals and the Christmas Boat Parade.

  

  A woman and her son gaze across the channel with a catamaran in the foreground. The median price of a home "on island" is about a million dollars. Each of the homes you see in the distance have their own private dock, to which the owners tie their boats.

  

  Still on Bayshore Walk, I shoot through some assembled kayaks toward the south end of the island. I've lived in the South Bay, to the west of Long Beach, for over 30 years, and didn't even know Naples was an island until a few years ago. You cross two small channels, one on each end , to get on and off. The island is only a couple of miles across. A lot of the Long Beach harbor area is manmade, but the attention to detail is wonderful. Long Beach is one of the prettiest cities in the state, and you've possibly seen plenty of my PhotoPosts dedicated to it, since I work in the city every weekday, and spend a lot of weekends there too.

  

  I parked my car on 2nd Street about four blocks from the overpass on BayShore, which was closed to traffic, and began my walk south of 2nd. I had looked at the map of the island prior to my journey, but didn't take a copy of it with me. I just wanted to see where I would end up, and of course knew the major part of my photo expedition would be taken along the canals. Here is Naples Elementary School, and the sign above the entrance is what I used for the title card. As usual, I'm down on the ground in the grass, trying to position the camera for the best composition of flowers, building, trees, and sky. It's summertime, so there aren't any clouds. A pity, but I can usually only get shots of clouds in the fall and winter.  

  

  Here's our first canal shot. The Rivo Alto Canal makes almost a complete circle around the south part of Naples. Along the sides are sidewalks passing in front of the "yards" of the many small cottages, each with it's own private boat dock. You can rent a variety of watercraft, including the surfboards with paddles. Sometimes these waterways get quite crowded. The Boat Parade attracts thousands of people who line these canals during Christmas, and the houses are all brightly decorated with lights and ornamentation as well.

  

  Naples was created by Arthur Parson in 1903 to resemble an Italian village, with winding canals and high arched bridges. The original lots sold quite quickly. In those days, one could get from Long Beach to downtown Los Angeles by the famous trolley known as the "Red Car" line. Today, we have the "Blue Line" segment of the Metro train. Naples was nearly destroyed in the 1933 earthquake and had to be rebuilt.

  

  Here is a statue in the "backyard" (or is it "front yard") of one of the homes fronting the Rivo Alto Canal. On the roof of the building is a panther ready to strike. If you click on any of these images, another larger version will appear in another window in your browser.

  

  In the center of the southern part of town is the Colonnade, which winds around the circular Naples Plaza Park, with the La Bella Fontana fountain as it's centerpiece. I shot many photos of the fountain, and used one of them in my last ElectricPoetry post as the title card. This is a very peaceful area, and I stopped to take a rest here before continuing on my walk around the island paradise.

  

  There is a smaller straight canal which shoots off from the Riva Alto, and this is the "street sign" for the Naples Canal. Three comely young gals were jumping into the canal from the bridge on which I took this photo. In the webshots gallery, I have some photos of a couple of them swimming in the canal. I was intrigued by the storybook fairy house behind the sign.

  

  The "intersection" of Naples Canal and the Rivo Alto Canal, showing docked boats, a pleasure boat motoring along, plus one of the tour boats in the center of the picture. All kinds of boats are docked here, from the small "Duffy Boats" (one of our company's customers) to larger motor boats and sailboats. I can tell you, even though I love the mobile home park, living on a place like Naples would be an ideal experience. You don't have to pay slip fees when you have a dock right off your property!

  

  I liked the juxtapostion of colors here in this photo, with somebody's surfboard backing an iron bench along the side of the canal. This is not public, and is private property. The guy's boat is at the right. If I lived here, I'd be home right now.

  

  A larger sailboat docked at nearly the end of the Naples Canal, backed by kayakers and hobie craft in the background. I set the camera to "beach scenes" for most of these photos, which digitally enhances all blues in the pictures, best for shooting water. Also used the regular Program setting, which allows for some in camera adjustments, although the day was so bright and clear I didn't need to make many. For some shots, I had to switch to manual focus so I could get the background clearly while making foreground items out of focus.

  

  After about a dozen shots, I got what I was looking for with this one. Of course I couldn't tell the guy in the sailboat to stop where he was, now could I? A lot of the docks on the east end looking out over the channel into Belmont Shore like this had decorative statues at either end, like this openmouth fishy.

  

  Only one gondolier was out when I was shooting, and I almost ran down the side of the canal to get a few shots of him. He wasn't singing an Italian aria, however. In the evening, as the weather cools a bit,and the sun sinks slowly in the west, the canals fill with more gondoliers ferrying lovers young and old around the island. You should always kiss your lover as you pass under one of the many bridges. This is tradition. Any takers?

  

  My last photo in this WhenWordsCollide series on Naples Island includes a shot of Captain Morgan, of the rum company fame, which I used in the title card. I was on the bridge, trying to get a good shot, when the owner of the house on which the dock where the captain stood told me I could go down on the dock to take closeup shots if I wanted. "Just don't fall in the water" he chuckled. I almost can't believe I haven't posted a new PhotoPost all year. My leg is healed. I'm working out, so I don't get too tired after walking five or six miles, like I did during this photo expedition. The weather is always nice. Next time, and soon, I hope, I will be driving down to Camp Pendleton, with the only unsullied bit of coastline between L.A. and San Diego, and visit the towns on either end of the "17 mile stretch", Oceanside to the south, and San Clemente to the north. See you then, and I hope you really enjoyed your tour of Naples Island, in Long Beach, California.

  

  FURTIVE EDIT: Sorry, I'm back. I just posted the entry, and realized I had forgotten a photo. So there's now 21. On my way back home, driving through Belmont Shore, I got a shot of some bicyclists in the right lane in front of me, in which cars and bicycles share the road. You probably don't see this too often in your town, so I thought I'd give you a treat. If you bicycle and you're riding in Belmont Shore, you're not trying to weave in and out of the parked cars, but you can ride right out in traffic. The whole right lane is marked, as you can see, for bicyclists.

   Bibliography: City of Long Beach, The Lone Sailor, Oil Islands, California's Gold, with Hewell Howser,  Navy Memorial, The Lone Sailor,  Naples: A Pictorial History, Naples, Long Beach, CA wiki, Google Maps.

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