We're used to seeing perfectly rendered breakers refracting moonlight and magic in paintings by Roy Gonzalez Tabora and Wyland. Stunning frames power the covers of magazines like Heavywater, with intimate portraits of surf-knights doing battle with sea monsters. We shoot tubes vicariously, thanks to a thriving surf DVD market, and enjoy surf cinema from the amazing "Riding Giants," to the pop corn of "Blue Crush." The artist-programmers behind the films "Finding Nemo," "Surf's Up" and "Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer" video game pursue the perfect virtual wave with near-religious zeal. But whether you're a full-time surfer or a landlubber, you haven't had the opportunity to appreciate a wave until you've seen it captured by Clark Little in all of its nuanced personality and borderline impossibility.

Little is a 30-year veteran of North Shore bombing ranges who, according to his bio, earned his reputation at Waimea Bay by "taking off on hopeless closeouts" and surviving "the nastiest shorebreak in the world." When asked about how his surfing experience influences his photography, he talks about how "anticipating the break," "lining up the sunset" or appreciating the singular nature of each and every wave comes from physical experience, not just observation.

A year ago, Little converted this knowledge of the ocean, coded in his every muscle and nerve, into a different kind of self-expression. As the son of a photography teacher and a frequent photographic subject himself, Little was no stranger to the art form. Mentored by surf photographer Brian Beilmann, Little grabbed a Nikon D200 and returned to the water with an entirely different perspective.

"Number Twenty-five" — among a collection of photographs now showing at Chinatown Boardroom — illustrates that it's one thing to understand sand and surf, based on having both in your hair and ears at the end of a day tumbling in the breaks. Little turns that understanding into a storm over the Ko'olau or a typhoon viewed from orbit. Shot at Ke Iki beach, Little says "this spot is my home in the water and my favorite place to take pictures at. The water color and clarity are second to none." Little's images demonstrate the interchangeability of fluid and solid, gravity as a force of sculpture, and how crystalline order becomes chaos.

His work reveals the art that hides in the actual split second, like pioneer photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton. Muybridge visually dissected human and animal motion in the 1800s, and is famous for the series of freeze frames depicting 24 stages of a galloping horse. Starting in the '30s, Edgerton was a pioneer of high-speed photography that captured the first fluid-fire instants of atomic explosions (not the subsequent mushroom cloud!), and the symmetry in a splash of milk. Little presents us with equally radical images and all but

erases the distance between photographer and subject. Little's technical and bodily-based innovation is to put himself in the system of the surf and become the means by which a wave takes a self-portrait.

Little's images naturally express such quasi-spiritual ideas, especially when contemplated individually. As the wave's lip turns over in crumbling spray it expresses the ripples Little calls "fishscales," or extends a limb of blown glass — the shore and sky are often visible at the end of the tube or edge of the frame. Here Little connects with a more easterly tradition of imaging the sea, as his perspective often echoes Hokusai's print of a tsunami appearing to loom over Mount Fuji itself in "Great Wave off the Coast of Kanagawa."

Art historical connections aside, Little is excited about the reception of his work. The surfing community is immensely supportive, and he frequently surprises longtime buddies when they learn of what he does. His work has been collected by Kelly Slater, Kalani Robb and Pat O'Connell (as a humble guy, he was hesitant to reveal even this abbreviated list of patrons), and it is getting increased commercial exposure.

Reaching the art of photography through surfing is clearly an opportunity for him to completely reinvest himself in an environment and practice that he is already intensely passionate about. Beneath his easy North Shore diction you can hear a developing realization that he may join the ranks of local artists who are not content to render Hawai'i as a simple set of sunsets. Keep an eye on this one as he paddles out into the established lineup of the Honolulu art scene.