This photo is Pipe, obviously, and it was taken on 13th of February, 2008. I got my first camera in June of 2007, so it was about eight months after I started experimenting with photos.

I was staying with a friend called Daniel Russo - a really good photographer from Hawaii. He lives up at Pupukea Heights, so when I saw the conditions I had to ride my pushbike back up the hill, get my housing, and ride back down, then when I swam out there were a over a hundred people in the water, plus twenty or thirty photographers.

However, when that wave came through there was not a single person in the frame. For me, that gives it a real sense of timelessness, and it's what I then set out to capture with my photography.

This moment happened in front of me and I simply documented it. That photo made me realise the wave is the star of the show, that the wave should be the focal point. In my work, if there is a surfer in frame, it's usually an unknown surfer, or a shadow, or a silhouette, or someone there just to comple the composition.

This is Mark Mathews at The Right - a big kind of hideous close-out at The Right. There are two stories here: there's the shot itself, and then there's what the shot led to.

I'd never hung out with Mark but he texted me out of the blue and said, "Hey, do you want to come to The Right for a swell? We're leaving in a few hours."

I was getting my coal mining gear ready for a weekend at work, because I worked Friday-Saturday-Sunday. And I just looked at the text, looked at my wife Amber, showed her, and we sat there weighing it all up. It's a wave I'd always wanted to go to.

Twenty minutes later I rang work and said I've come down with some kind of mysterious illness and I won't be in all weekend. Next thing I was on a flight. I told Mark on the way over that I wanted to try and shoot an angle that no-one else has shot.

He was stoked, and he made it happen, too. One of the teams stopped towing for about twenty minutes so he zoomed in on a ski and said, "Ray, jump on the back of this ski and try and get that shot you wanted to get." So I did.

I've seen photos of this wave shot from the channel and they don't look anything like my photo. They miss so much because the small closeout to the left - small as in twelve foot! - blocks the view. They couldn't see what happened to him. As it was, I only had about half a second where he was in my line of sight.

This is one of those instances where the human being gives the wave scale, just shows the awesome height and thickness of it.

This shot led to me becoming involved with Nikon Australia, because it won Surf Photo of the Year in 2012, so that introduced me to all the people I work with now. After that I showed it to my boss, the one I called in sick to. He said, "Coal mining's gonna be here forever. I don't want to block you."

Unlike the last shot, I didn't immediately know I had something special here. It wasn't until that night, or maybe the next day when I looked at it on a screen, that I realised it was a good shot.

Other people seemed to know because the photo went viral. It was on Buzzfeed and the front page of Reddit, plus a whole host of news channels, websites, and corporations picked it up. I think it just made people question what they were looking at, because as a thumbnail a lot of people thought it was a mountain, a landscape shot, until they realised that it's actually a wave.

I don't even think that wave broke. It was two waves, they went up and went back down. It's definitely hard to envision riding it, but I like the lack of scale, and the rule of thirds, highlights, the centre point.

It's definitely in my top three most popular photos - if not number one. It's hanging in offices in Wall Street, it's hanging in the foyers of international NGOs, it's a photo that showed my work to a lot of people, and because of that it's the photo that's had the most reaction, the most people talking about it.

And on a personal level, I can see how my past was responsible for this photo: I can see my history of coal mining, my history of growing up in the ocean, and all the decisions I made that led to this point. None of that will translate to the general public, but when I look at it, I think of all those things.

This photo was taken down in the Great Australian Bight, and it's just as nightfall is approaching. Once again, I'd set off on the trip to shoot something that I personally had never seen before.

I had a few things in mind, and this was pretty high on my priority list. I'd been mapping where the sun would be at certain times of the day, what angle it will be, and I tried to wait for the right time to position ourselves, to get this kind of shot. I felt like I spent two or three weeks trying to get exactly the spot, the dot on the coastline, where certain things would be, where the tide was gonna be, and it all came together for for one 1000th of a second.

I did everything I could to improve my chances of getting the shot that I had in my mind. And to be honest, this exceeded what I had in my mind, so I was really fortunate.

It's a recent shot and the response has been good. I don't know if they get it...I don't know if I get it - it's ghostly and it's white.

I've used it on the cover of my latest book and that was a gamble, because it's not a wholly pleasing image - it's dark, there's no blue sky, swaying palms, or whatever. But it's where I'm at right now and because of that alone I had to put it on the cover.