In Dreamworks "Surf's Up" they modeled waves like these with NURBS patches with morphs "attached to them" to produce the animations. Gotta love DVD special features.

(channeling House, M.D.) I suppose you could try to composite it but you wouldn't get the "spray". Vue would probably get you a better image with less effort than Poser. On the other hand, Maya has an awesome Ocean shader which looks a lot like this, coupled with its Dynamics module could reproduce this shot easily. (sigh) Though I've been no help to you, I wish you good luck in your quest.