Al Whitaker’s Early-Morning Photo of Excelsior Bay

On the mornings that weather permits, Al Whitaker likes to rise at dawn, pack up his camera gear and drive toward Excelsior Bay in the hopes of capturing another remarkable moment. Behind the lens, in those early hours of the day, Whitaker says he’s able to forget about all the little things in life and concentrate solely on the art. “Walking around in nature … it’s quiet and peaceful listening to the world slowly wake up,” he says. “You feel alone with your thoughts, and that’s why I’m into photography.” One morning as the sun began to cast light on the water, Whitaker mounted his Olympus E620 SLR camera on a tripod with a 12–16mm lens. And then he waited for the right moment, which he found in this scene: storm-cloud remnants, shining majestically in the morning sun, reflected on the calm water below. “I broke the rules and put the horizon dead center in the photograph, but it’s because I wanted to accentuate the symmetry,” he says. Whitaker picked up photography during the 1970s, after his wife bought him a film single-lens reflex camera for a fifth anniversary present. Forty years later, he felt dissatisfied by the quality of film processing, so he bought a digital camera, the same one used in this photo.Though photography is only a hobby for Whitaker, he is slowly starting to share his work with others. In June, he and another artist hosted an art showing at the Commons in Excelsior.