Dark Side of the Lens: A Poetic Short Film by Surf Photographer Mickey Smith

Dark Side of the Lens presents the art and inner voice of Irish surf pho­tog­ra­ph­er Mick­ey Smith. The six minute film lets you expe­ri­ence Smith’s aes­thet­ics trans­lat­ed into beau­ti­ful prac­tice. (“I wan­na see waverid­ing doc­u­ment­ed the way I see it in my head, and the way I feel it in the sea.”) But then it rather poet­i­cal­ly cracks open the per­son­al phi­los­o­phy of the artist:

I nev­er set out to become any­thing in par­tic­u­lar, only to live cre­ative­ly and push the scope of my expe­ri­ence for adven­ture and for pas­sion… The raw bru­tal cold coast­lands for the right waverid­ers to chal­lenge – this is where my heart beats hard­est…

Most folk don’t even know who we are, and what we do or how we do it, let alone what they 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 a liv­ing where I’m scrap­ing.… If there’s no future in it, this is a present worth remem­ber­ing.

The aes­thet­ic choic­es. The per­son­al deci­sions. It’s all what’s hap­pen­ing behind the cam­era, the place no audi­ence sees, the “dark side of the lens.” You can find the full tran­script of Smith’s com­men­tary after the jump…

A final note: Dark Side of the Lens was born out of a project called “Short Sto­ries.” Estab­lished by Relent­less Ener­gy Drink, the UK-based project chal­lenged film­mak­ers to cre­ate their own mini opus, to explore and cel­e­brate “no half mea­sures” in film. Find oth­er shorts here.

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