Once upon a previous website, I wrote a semi-love-letter to all things related to water. It featured documentary style photographs of a couple of local wakeboarders - a personal project of sorts. Although I shut that website down as my brand grew and pivoted, I regret not saving that blog somewhere. So here’s an short and upgraded version featuring a different water-related industry.

*“There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries - stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water…”*
***Moby Dick, by Herman Melville***

As a native Texan who was raised on Galveston Bay, I love all things coastal - the salty bay breeze, the sound of waves lapping on the shore, the open horizon dotted by boats, and the colors that dance on the water during sunrise and sunset.

So when the art director of Houstonia Magazine contacted me about photographing a story involving the “oyster queen of Galveston Bay,” I was thrilled. The fact the photos would be taken outside one of the best seafood restaurants in the area (Pier 6 - where I planned to grab dinner afterward) was icing on the cake. Oysters Rockefeller? A seafood platter? Yes, please!

While dining on a seafood platter, have you ever been curious what happens to all the used oyster shells from a seafood place? If you drive up to Pier 6, you’d notice the giant piles of shells sitting out to dry in the parking lot. Lisa Halili, co-owner of Prestige Owners in Dickinson, is making good use of these shells from Pier 6 (her son’s restaurant). She’s established the first private-industry oyster restoration project just a stone’s-throw (or oyster-shell’s-throw) away from the restaurant. By partnering with groups like San Leon Oyster Fest, the Nature Conservancy in Texas and Texas Sea Grant, a unique collaboration has been established with hopes to restore 10-acres of oyster habitat in the bay.

Back to the hills of oyster shells…after shells dry six months under the sun, they are then dumped back into the bay to create a reef for repopulating oysters…a vital organism to the coastal ecosystem. With all of the hurricanes and flooding that hits Houston and the Gulf Coast, the ecosystem is constantly suffering blows. This new reef will be one step in the right direction to benefit the marine ecology of the area, as well as the local seafood industry.

Now that you’ve had a short ecology lesson…back to the photos. For this feature, we initially scheduled one visit to Pier 6 to capture portraits of Lisa Halili and Kathy Sweezey, of the Nature Conservancy. We had a few variables to battle that day including a tight deadline and on-and-off rain showers, but everything fell in place to create a couple of beautiful portraits. While chatting with Lisa and Kathy that day, a follow-up trip was planned to document the re-shelling process. Again, booking around weather made it dance in schedules. But the follow-up trip paid off and rounded out the feature nicely with documentary-style photos at the bayside locale.

Sea-ing things.

Houston makers.