Celtic Blood, Ocean Poetry

I can’t seem to get this short artistic piece out of my head.    It’s beautiful, haunting, grinding…and even inspiring. The videography is incredible and introduced really well with the quiet, creeping open. The “surfer poetry” that accompanies also really resonates. It was created by renowned photographer and bodyboarder Mickey Smith. Take a look.

Here’s some of my favorite lines:

“Most folk don’t even know who we are, what we do, or how we do it.  Let alone pay us for it. I never want to take this for granted. So I try and keep my motivation simple, real, and positive. If I only scrape a living, at least it is a living worth scraping.  If there is no future in it, at least it’s a present worth remembering.  For fires of happiness and waves of gratitude.  For everything that brought us to that point on Earth at that moment in time, to do something worth remembering.”

Here’s Smith on the experience:

“Originally I planned for the film to be more anonymous, rather than biographical, an all encompassing piece, to represent the photographers keeping the surfing machine afloat”, explains Smith.

“Something that offers insight into what it takes to grind out a living as a water-based photographer in the surfing industry: a short experimental glimpse at a life lived in the shadow of obsessive photographic pursuits.”

“It also gave me the chance to ask myself a few questions, like, if you’re always observing and documenting what you see and experience, are you ever truly present? Questions like that where I could step back think and then see what the answers were”, Smith says.