It was early in the morning and there was a faint glow on the horizon, recalls Tim Macmillan. He's standing on the stern of a 20-foot vessel bouncing on the waves. It seemed almost idyllic except for the great white shark swimming two inches from his toes.

"That was a bit worrying," says Macmillan, the photographer who captured this time-frozen image of a great white leaping into the air, traveling 30 degrees around the creature. (See image at top right.) The technology is similar to that used in the hit cult movie The Matrix.

Even more worrisome was that Macmillan and his assistant, Andy Kemp, had just three days to capture the elusive shark, which mostly feeds in the early morning hours off the coast of South Africa's Seal Island. To make matters worse, Macmillan was suffering from a head-ripping toothache and Kemp was prone to severe seasickness.

That fateful morning the two men had their doubts. They'd gotten too late of a start; the sharks had probably come and gone already. So they decided to pack it in for the morning, pulling up their small underwater rig of 10 Nikon cameras and shark bait — that's when they got a shock instead of the shot.

"There we were in a 20-foot boat with a 25-foot shark in the air," says Macmillan. "It's hard to think nothing will happen. You are always nervous out there. Sharks are very intelligent."

But Macmillan and Kemp finally got their lucky shot on the very last day. Their rig sat patiently at the back of the boat ready for just this moment. At daybreak a curious great white hit the decoy. There was barely enough light. For Macmillan, this time, there was no fright.

"I just opened everything and crossed my fingers," he says.

This would be the first time that a great white had been captured on film using time-slice cameras and frozen-time technology. Macmillan had used the technique photographing much-friendlier dolphins on a bigger boat with twice as many cameras. Working with sharks and facing his own physical limitations made this assignment a real challenge.

"The real challenge was in that we had never tried anything like that before."