It started with a photograph. It almost always does.

At the time he took it, Clark Little was a surfer and the supervisor of a botanical garden in Hawaii, not a photographer. But when his wife, Sandy, wanted a photo of the ocean for their bedroom wall, Clark, who'd surfed the shorebreak for years, had an idea. He said, "Don't buy one. I can go out there and do it."

The shorebreak.

Clark can talk about "taking off on the big, powerful waves, and pulling into the tubes and getting that vision of the barrel and the thrill and fascination of the colors and the light," but, really, words fail when surfers try to describe it. What they see from inside the curl of a wave about to slam down on the beach is unique, spectacular, frightening. And indescribable.

But with a camera, Clark could capture it. People would finally see what he saw. And so shorebreak photography became a consuming passion.

Shorebreak waves are exactly what you suppose they are: waves that break directly on the shore. They happen when swells meet obstructions or abrupt changes in bottom depth. When these waves break they release all their energy into shallow water. They're unpredictable and extremely dangerous, and it's not suggested that you go out to meet them for any reason whatsoever. Not even to take pictures. We're inviting admiration, not emulation.

Two years into taking shorebreak images, Clark resigned from his job and turned to photography full time.

"A lot of people who've never surfed or even gone into the ocean love these photographs," he says. "I'm happy to be able to share my love and passion for the beauty I see." He gets great satisfaction hearing from people who have been moved by his images.

"The whole thing is about getting into position. When a huge set's coming, maybe 12-feet high, I have to make a decision where I want to put myself to get the image. There's a thrill and little bit of fear. I'm knee deep, looking into this cave of water, trying to position my hand as steady and level as I can and then I'm hitting the trigger as the wave is getting close—sometimes 20, sometimes ten, sometimes five feet away, and I'm shooting from two to ten to 12 frames. If that wave's setting up perfectly to throw a beautiful curl, I'm holding the trigger with half fear and half excitement, just knowing I'm in the sweet spot. From surfing the shorebreak all these years, I take that experience and knowledge and put it into the barrel.