From Pipeline to Hollywood
Don King was born in Honolulu in 1960 and grew up in Kailua, on Oahu. He started surfing in Waikiki in 1969, and at 14 he took a waterproof Kodak Instamatic out into the lineup at Pipeline.
While still in high school at Punahou he sold his first photo to Surfing magazine, and it ran on the cover. At Stanford he studied psychology and played on the water polo team that won NCAA titles in 1978, 1980 and 1981. Through the 1980s and into the early 1990s he was a staff photographer for Surfing, known for his wide-angle shots from inside the barrel at Pipeline.
He shot water footage for Herbie Fletcher's Wave Warriors, and went on to film water sequences for Hollywood: North Shore, The Endless Summer II, Cast Away, Blue Crush, Step into Liquid, Riding Giants and Soul Surfer, plus six seasons of the TV series Lost.
With Jeff Hornbaker he filmed and directed two boat-trip films: The Hole (1996), with Tom Carroll, Ross Clarke-Jones and Martin Potter, and No Destination (1998), with Kelly Slater, Taylor Knox, Chris Malloy, Pat O'Connell and Ross Williams in the Mentawai Islands.
Don's own archive is now being scanned and preserved by the Nalu Film Foundation.
