Don King was a high school sophomore the first time he sold a photograph.[1][2] The purchaser was Surfing Magazine, which used it on its cover of an issue.
One thing that earns King such raves is his mellow personality—in a type-A industry, he's renowned for keeping his cool. Another is his sheer water sense and athletic ability—tall and lanky, he was once a competitive swimmer and college water-polo player and has long been a top-notch bodysurfer. It's that watersports background, he says, that allows him to bob nonchalantly at the ground zero of huge, punishing waves, holding his shot until the last possible second before diving to avoid the surfer's slashing fins and the wave's crushing lip.… And then there's King's legendary eye for the shot. "Don has an uncanny ability to hit the button only when it's magic," says Jai Mansson, who works with King often as assistant cameraman. "He's like a Zen master."
^ abcDerek Ferrar (December 2004 – January 2005). "Shooting the Tube". Hana Hou! Vol. 7, No. 6. King still remembers the thrill of getting his first picture published—a cover shot for Surfing magazine—when he was just fifteen. "I was a sophomore at Punahou School," he recalls, "and my friend and I missed an assembly or something to go surfing. We went out to a secret spot, and the waves were perfect. This one beautiful blue wave came, and it barreled right over both of us. He was in the back of the tube, with this big blue curtain surrounding him, and I was completely inside it with him. At that time, you really didn't see shots like that, and when the magazine came out, I was just so stoked, it was unbelievable. When you're in high school, there's nothing cooler than that." He continued contributing to surf magazines through high school and then college at Stanford. He spent half the college year in classes and the other half shooting surfing in Hawai'i and Indonesia.… He became a staff photographer for Surfing, and his wide-angle shots from deep in the tube at Pipeline helped define the magazine's look in the early '80s.
^David Heuring (November 1, 2003). "John Paul Beeghly On a Perfect Wave". Studio Daily. …the dramatic surfing action is almost entirely shot with film cameras, because surfing must be filmed in slow motion to capture the nuances of such a fast sport. Another reason for shooting Super 16 was to accommodate Jack McCoy and Don King, undoubtedly the best surf camera operators in the world. They use very compact 16mm format cameras that can roll at extremely high frame rates to capture the beautiful, smooth slow motion you see in the film [Step into Liquid].
