Thick, white foam curls over the sand like whipped cream on spice cake, while light turns a towering wave translucent green in Mike "Jocko" McFadden's photographs on exhibit at Red Brick Gallery in Ventura.

The ocean is the focus of McFadden's photography, whether seascapes of a moonlit beach or a surfer's perspective of the underside of a wave.

But the Ventura photographer doesn't just shoot from shore with a long lens. He gets right into the water for many of his shots.

"That's my favorite thing to do," McFadden said, "to swim out and do the sunrise shots or backlit shots — to see what Mother Nature does with that water; it's different every time."

McFadden took to the water early and started surfing at the age of 9, right off the end of California Street in Ventura, and photography followed soon after.

"In the mid-'60s I got a little Brownie Super 8 movie camera and started experimenting with it with my friends I surfed with," he said. He won a high school film festival in 1971, the year he graduated from Ventura High School, but then he put the camera away for about 10 years in favor of surfing.

"I wanted to surf and I was always stuck on the hill, shooting my buddies," he said. "But then seeing old-timers shooting movies in Hawaii got me more inspired. I came back to Ventura and started experimenting with water housing on movie cameras."

He mounted the camera on the board and had a remote, radio-controlled switch he could turn on at the right moment on the beach. He also had a switch on the side of the camera housing.

"Sometimes I was on the beach; sometimes I was on the board," he said. "You couldn't fall or you would run the whole roll out. It was really expensive."

Mentored by his friend Bill Delaney, a surf filmmaker, McFadden started making films himself, selling them to movie and video production companies and to surf clothing companies for trade show videos.

"I did a lot of that, but then I just put the movie camera down and traded all my movie equipment for still-camera equipment," he said. "I love it. Every wave is so abstract."

He free dives and gets the best colors right under the surface, he said.

"I want to show people things they would never imagine," he said, "like those mornings when the sun is rising and the wave looks red like lava.

"There's no manipulation; it's all natural," he said.

To get his shots requires being right out there with nature. "First Lesson" shows a mother and baby dolphin swimming through a wave. But wildlife isn't always friendly.

"I got chased in by an elephant seal at Hueneme Pier," he said.

To support his photography, he works as a shipwright, ripping out and remodeling interiors of boats and yachts, building new cabinetry.

"I try to get on bigger jobs that take a couple of months and then go on vacation," he said. He plans to go to Micronesia next.

But he often shoots at local beaches. He recently took some interesting night photographs at McWay Falls at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park in Big Sur during a full moon.

"I did a three-hour exposure from midnight to 3 a.m.," he said. "I stay up all night shooting when I have the full moon. I wanted the effect of the waterfall looking like a horse's tail and the way the water washes up on the beach. Long exposures make colors come out like pastels, that blurred, creamy look."

For most of the shots, he used a Canon EOS camera with AquaTech water housing, which uses film, but he recently switched to a Canon Mark III digital.

"It was a hard choice," he said. "At first, (digital) didn't look alive like film," he said. "It was like video vs. film back in the '80s. But now it's there. I waited long enough. I had to wait for the right camera to come out with all the right stuff. When you are shooting breaking waves, you have to shoot at about 10 frames per second."

"In the old days, you had to be really careful, you couldn't just shoot them off," he said. "Now with digital, you can sit in the water and play it back. You can just erase them if you don't like them."

You just know when you have a good shot, he said.

"You can take thousands and it's not there, and then one can be right on."

McFadden is participating in the "Summer's Heat" exhibit through Aug. 4 at Red Brick Gallery, 328 E. Main St. For more information, visit the Web site: http://www.redbrickart.com.

— To recommend an artist to be profiled in this section, contact Nicole D'Amore at ArtProfiles@roadrunner.com or 405-0364.