The bathroom of my flat has not seen daylight since 2024. Every window sealed with gaffer tape and bin liner, a red bulb where the vanity light used to be, chemicals lined up on the shelf where sensible people keep moisturiser.
I started developing my own film because I wanted to understand what happens after the shutter - the half of photography models never see. I kept doing it because it quietly rebuilt how I work in front of the camera.
The first lesson was economy. A roll of medium format gives you ten frames. Ten. When I shoot my own tests now, I feel each frame spend itself, and I've carried that into commercial work: even on a digital set firing thousands of exposures, I try to make each pose a deliberate sentence rather than a stream of syllables. Photographers notice. "You edit in-camera," one told me. It's the nicest thing anyone has said about my work.
The second lesson was patience with imperfection. Film fails in beautiful, unrepeatable ways - light leaks, grain, a frame half-fogged that turns out better than the one you planned. Watching my own face emerge in the developing tray, flaws first, taught me to stop fighting the shots where I look human. Those are usually the keepers.
The last lesson is simpler: it is good to be a beginner at something adjacent to your expertise. Humility with chemicals translates to humility on set. And when a photographer starts explaining light to me now, I can ask the kind of question that changes the shoot.