Cool Jobs Nobody Talks About #17: Surf Photographer

Last year I found myself hanging out on the North Shore of Oahu in Hawaii at the famous Pipeline Beach. I spent a couple of hours watching some of the best surfers in the world surf the biggest waves I had ever seen. They were BANANAS!  While I was watching the surfers, I noticed this guy who literally just sat there in the water with a camera getting pounded by waves taking pictures of the surfers. I was pretty interested in why anybody would ever want to do that and when he came onto the shore I made sure to talk to him and ask him what he was doing and more importantly, why he was doing it.

After talking to him for a while and he told me he was a surf photographer.  Maybe the best. Job. Ever.

He had a million stories (a million stories might be a slight exaggeration but he had A LOT) from traveling around the globe filming and taking pictures of the top surfers in the world. He talked about some of the crazy situations he had gotten into and he talked about struggling to get started as a surf photographer.

He told me about how most of his family thought he was crazy when he first started but he felt passionate about it so he kept pushing forward. Finally, he told me what it felt like to sell his first picture to a major magazine. He said since that first sale he knew that this is what he would do for a long, long time.

I asked him why he became a surf photographer and his answer couldn’t have been simpler, “I hate desks, I love surfing and I am not good enough to be pro.”

It’s that simple sometimes.

How come nobody ever talks about these kind of jobs? What are other cool jobs nobody talks about?

PS Take a look at this video and see what kind of work these photographers do.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Jobs Nobody Talks About. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.