The Dark Side of the Lens: Olympics, Surfing and Doing Something Worth Remembering

This is a day worth remembering, celebrating events worth remembering by athletes worth celebrating. The closing ceremonies of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

After an early morning rise to cheer Canadian men to Olympic Gold in the hockey final, while the glow of the golden moment shone warm and I dig, in futile effort, through my ten bins of Christmas decor for the gold maple leaf ornament, hoping to photograph it in its perfect symbolism of this transcendent, if transitory, moment.

Giving up, I turn back to search the sites of my favorite pro photographers for new images; inspiration for my own feeble attempts at capturing and sharing beauty in all her forms. And I see John Marriott who leads me to Brandon Brown who leads me to a video of surf photographer, Mickey Smith.

As a poet, I was compelled to transcribe Mickey's last few words on why he does what he does. Enjoy the video, then read the words after in more depth. This is a clarion call to a deeper soul search:

am I doing something worth remembering?

 

The dark side of the lens
An art form unto itself
and us, the silent workhorses
of the surfing world
There’s no sugary cliché.
Most folk don’t even know who we are,
what we do or how we do it,
let alone want to pay us for it.

I never want to take this for granted,
so I try to keep motivation simple,
real and positive.
If I only scrape a living,
at least it’s living worth scraping.
If there’s no future in it,
at least it’s a present worth remembering.

The fires of happiness
and waves of gratitude
For everything that brought us
to that point, enough,
at that moment in time
to do something worth remembering
with a photograph
or a scar

I feel genuinely lucky
to hand on heart saying
I love doing what I do
I may never be a rich man
If I live long enough
I’ll certainly have a tale or two
for the nephews
and I dig the thought of that

-Michael Lee (Mickey) Smith