Darkroom to Dark Fiction: A Stroll Through My Photographic Past

If you know me for my writing, you probably imagine me hunched over a keyboard, brooding about secrets and storms. But before the brooding came the shooting—not the kind that ends with police tape, the kind that ends with contact sheets and enlargers.

I’m a long-time photography tragic. Film loaders, an odour of fixer in the air, and a habit of noticing the most inconvenient details right when someone says, “Don’t worry, no one will notice.”

Photography gave me a creative spine. It trained my eye, paid my bills, let me teach, and eventually handed me a narrative voice sharp enough to cut paper. This post is my friendly stroll down that lane: from portraits and weddings to the classroom, the storms I chased for no sensible reason, and the way it all folded neatly (and sometimes messily) into my fiction.

The Eye That Never Turns Off

Photographers don’t look; we scan. We hover at the edge of the room, catching the little tremors most eyes slide past: a hand that won’t quite settle, a smile that’s trying too hard, the hush that happens between two words that ought to be harmless. I wrote about that predatory-but-honest eye in [Photography: A Confession Beyond the Lens], where I admit the lens can feel like a soft interrogation lamp—and how those “tiny cracks” in a face became a language I later poured into prose. That ability to see what people didn’t intend to reveal? It’s storytelling fuel.

Faces First: Portraits and the Long Exhale

Portraits were my gateway drug. As a shooter, you learn to be part therapist, part magician, part stealth comedian. The first fifteen minutes always belong to nerves. After that, the muscles unclench, jokes land, and the real person slides to the surface like a seal breaking water. That’s the moment you breathe with them and click. Those sessions taught me rhythm, timing, how to build a beat and then release it—exactly what I now do in scenes on the page.

I’ve always believed portraits aren’t about smiles; they’re about admissions. A tilt of the chin is a miniature character arc. A glance off-camera is subtext. Put three frames in a row and you’ve got a story.

The Wedding Years

If portraits are meditation, weddings are triathlons. You sprint for rings and kisses, jog for candids, and hurdle aunties who walk into the aisle at precisely the wrong time. I built a weekly ritual around them: Mondays off, Tuesdays through Thursdays glued to the screen, massaging skin tones and keeping Uncle Kevin’s flamboyant tie under control. That rhythm pops up in [A Wedding Photographer’s Tale], where life and love misunderstandings intrude on a perfectly good editing day—because of course they do.

Wedding work honed my reflexes—technical and emotional. You learn how to build micro-narratives: hush → reveal → celebration → messy afterglow. You learn to be everywhere and nowhere, friendly but invisible, ready for the shot that no one will ever repeat. That sense of sequence is exactly what keeps a chapter alive. I don’t just “cover” a scene now; I stage it in time.

Storms, Lightning… and That One Shot I Chased Forever

Confession: I’m a weather tragic, too. Somewhere along the line, I caught an incurable case of “surely the next storm will be the one.” I even wrote about that quixotic quest in [Chasing Lightning: The Curse of One Photographer’s Elusive Fantasy]. Picture me, damp, happy, and hopelessly optimistic on a coastal headland, waiting for a sky monster to light itself just so. The perfect bolt never did arrive, but the habit of waiting inside tension—that I kept. It’s now a creative superpower. I can hold a scene taut for pages because I once stood in a squall holding a tripod like a lightning rod with ambitions.

Teaching: How Explaining Apertures Turned Me Into a Better Storyteller

Teaching was the hidden gift. Invite students into a classroom, and you must turn instincts into sentences. You can’t say, “I just feel it.” You have to name it: framing, negative space, leading lines, the way light shapes character. You learn to ask, “What’s your image about?”—which is the same as asking, “What is your scene about?” In my workshops, I’d push students to shoot with intention and sequence like editors. Later, I caught myself giving my chapters the same critique: What’s the beat? Where’s the turn? Why does this moment belong?

I’ve spent plenty of time laying out those foundations for beginners and improvers alike, and I’ve also written a friendly primer—[Ten Tips To Become a Photographer (or a better one)]—because none of us is beyond a good refresher. (Tip #11 would’ve been “Bring snacks. Creativity runs on snacks,” but I ran out of numbers.)

The Muse Who Phoned From the Future

Every creative life has a hinge, a moment when someone pushes you through the next door. For me, it was a petite, wildly determined student named Julie who rang the studio during a rough patch and asked if I took work-experience kids. She already knew her way around film and lenses better than some adults. Soon enough, she was navigating trains and buses to get to my place, feeding me fresh energy and making my complacency blush.

That whole improbable, delightful chapter lives in [My Young Photography Muse]. Mentoring her not only revived my curiosity; it reminded me how collaboration works. She proposed ideas that forced me to rethink tired patterns—how movement changes a frame, how to let background chaos serve the subject. To this day, when I’m stuck on a paragraph, I ask: “If I changed the motion—slowed here, panned there—what would sharpen?” That habit was Julie’s gift.

The Myth of the Only Photographer Story

Say “photographer” in fiction, and people leap to war zones: battle dust, flak jackets, a Leica with scars. For the record, I have nothing against grit; I even love reading that stuff. But I wanted to write another kind of photographer: someone whose battle lines are domestic and psychological, whose storms are meteorological and marital. I unpack that expectation in [Stories About Photographers: Is The ‘War Correspondent’ The Only Option?] and explain why my lens points at the places most people call “safe”… right up until they aren’t.

Portraits, Weddings, Weather… and How It All Became Prose

Put these threads together and a pattern emerges:

• Observation → Subtext. Years of reading faces taught me to write the sentence after the smile—the thought a character doesn’t say out loud.
• Sequence → Structure. Wedding timelines taught me how to build anticipation and land an emotional climax without being cheesy (no offence, cake).
• Light → Mood. Storm work taught me to paint scenes in contrast: what to reveal, what to silhouette.
• Teaching → Clarity. Explaining the craft to others taught me to explain it to myself—on the page, where it matters.

That’s why, when I finally turned back to long-form writing, the language emerged visually. I didn’t “describe a room”; I lit it. I didn’t “introduce a character”; I framed them, let the negative space speak, then moved the camera closer until something true caught my eye.

A Gentle Pivot: When the Camera Put Down Its Coffee and Became a Book

For years, these experiences had been recorded in separate notebooks. I had class outlines, shoot diaries, storm logs, portrait contact sheets with little arrows and “THIS” scrawled in the margins. At some point, they started whispering to each other. The wedding edit rhythms matched my chapter rhythms. The way a storm builds matched the way a secret swells in a marriage. The way a subject finally relaxes under lights matched the moment a character finally tells the truth.

It all clicked (pun irresistible). I began drafting pages that felt like contact sheets, scenes that read like prints emerging in the tray. The camera didn’t vanish; it changed medium. The narrative began printing itself in words.

If you want a taste of the photographer’s moral weather—how the gaze confesses, seduces, betrays—dip into [Photography: A Confession Beyond the Lens] again, then stroll through the wedding-week aftermath in [A Wedding Photographer’s Tale]. Top it off with a laugh at my storm-chasing optimism in [Chasing Lightning], and the craft refreshers of [Ten Tips…] when your inner beginner wants a biscuit. You’ll hear the same voice that writes my fiction, just with fewer corpses and more umbrellas.

Meanwhile, Back in the Studio: What the Work Taught Me About People

• Most people want to be seen; they just don’t want the cost of being seen.
• Every celebration contains a secret; every secret hums in photos if you stare long enough.
• Students don’t care what you know until they can feel what you see.
• The weather is going to do what it wants. Your job is to be politely brilliant anyway.

These are also the rules of storytelling. The cost of being seen is the heart of a scene. Secrets are plots in slippers. And being politely brilliant anyway? That’s just another way of saying “edit.”

Where the Path Leads (Cue the Book-Title Drumroll)

All roads—portraits, weddings, classrooms, storms—eventually braided into a single narrative about love, control, desire, and the truths people try to bury. The camera taught me to notice them; fiction let me test them. And that’s how the book you’re holding (or the tab you’re hovering over) came to be.

Near the end of this long, slightly damp, very satisfying road, I put a name on the spine: SEETHINGS. The novel carries the photographer’s eye into places where most people prefer the light switch firmly off—domestic rituals, private betrayals, the quiet wars fought in kitchens and bedrooms. It’s the same gaze that once waited out a thunderhead, now focused on the human storm brewing three feet away.

If you’re curious about how that eye behaves inside fiction’s darker rooms, start with that title. And if you’d like to see the bridge posts that shaped it, simply click through the links I’ve provided throughout the post.

Bring snacks. (Trust me, creativity still runs on snacks.)

–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)