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The Terrible Creative: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Patrick Fore
The Terrible Creative is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative professionals working through the parts of the creative process no gear review or business course ever covers. Each episode is 30 to 40 minutes. Solo. Story-driven. Built around mental health, artistic identity, and what honest work costs in a career rewarding performance over truth. This is not a photography podcast about cameras, presets, or client strategy. This is a podcast about the inner experience of being a creative professional, made for the mid-career photographer or designer who has mastered the technical side but lost the thread. Hosted by Patrick Fore, commercial photographer, author, and former lead photographer and brand designer for Taylor Guitars. His work has appeared globally for clients like Nike, Petco, and Verizon. He built this show because none of the podcasts he found addressed the real problem. If you are a photographer or creative professional who feels competent on the outside and quietly lost on the inside, you are a Terrible Creative. This is your podcast.
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- Sep 8, 202612 min
Before Episode 081
Dear Terrible Friends,This episode is going to be a little different. I wanted to let you know that I'm going to be taking a little bit of a break for a bit. I’m actually about to leave (in a few days) for a three-week trip with my daughter. We’re going to bounce around the East Coast a little bit. Spending some time around the mountains of Virginia, then DC, then Philly, NYC, Boston then into the sticks of New England. By the way, if you’re in those areas, and want to grab coffee or a beer, let me know. I can try to make it work. I would love to meet some people.But yeah, I’m going to take some pictures actually. I’m bringing my camera, with one 35mm lens and make some stuff and to document our trip obviously. And beyond that, I’m going to catch up on some reading. I’m going to think a lot. I’m probably going to write some things down that turn out to be completely stupid and irrelevant later.And rather than frantically making a bunch of episodes before I leave so there’s something sitting in your podcast feed, I’m just… not going to do that.But really though, I’m going to start figuring out what the next version of The Terrible Creative looks like.I don’t know exactly what that is yet. And I actually think that’s a good thing.I’m not announcing a new season. I’m not making some grand promise about what happens next. I don’t even know exactly when I’ll be back. I just know that after 80 episodes, I want episode 81 to feel like we’re going somewhere.But before I go, I really do want to say thank you.There are some of you who have been listening to this weird little project since the beginning. That was April of 2025.Some of you listen every week. You’ve sent me emails. You’ve shared episodes with people. You’ve bought the book. Some of you have even supported this show with your own hard-earned money.And I don’t take any of that lightly.The fact that I can make something like this, put it out into the world, and there are actual people on the other side who choose to spend part of their day listening to me is still kind of incredible to me.So to everybody who has listened to any of these first 80 episodes, and especially those of you who have stuck around through all the different versions of this thing…Thank you.Follow me at the links below. Email me, DM me and check in. I would love to hear from you.So until...I come back with Episode 81, I will see you later, whenever later is.PatrickThe Book Lessons From a Terrible PhotographerThe Terrible Creative on InstagramPatrick Fore on InstagramEmail Me (Patrick Fore)Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California. -----------------------Office Hours with PatrickStuck on your website, portfolio, pricing, marketing, or business strategy?Office Hours is a one-on-one, 60-ish minute conversation to help you work through whatever you’re trying to figure out. No agenda. No curriculum. No pitch. Just honest feedback, thoughtful questions, and a fresh perspective.$99Learn more or book your session:https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours
- Sep 1, 20261h 2m
Worth - Why Great Photographers Get $600 Clients
Office Hours with PatrickStuck on your website, portfolio, pricing, marketing, or business strategy?Office Hours is a one-on-one, 60-ish minute conversation to help you work through whatever you’re trying to figure out. No agenda. No curriculum. No pitch. Just honest feedback, thoughtful questions, and a fresh perspective.$99Learn more or book your session:https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hoursEpisode 80 — WorthPhotographers love telling each other to “know your worth.”Okay. What’s mine?One client trusts you with a production worth tens of thousands of dollars. Another pays you a few hundred bucks and tells you that you didn’t do a very good job.Same photographer. Same experience. Same eye.In this episode, I’m trying to figure out what those numbers actually mean. We talk about day rates, lowball inquiries, why better photography isn’t always more valuable to the person buying it, and what happens when we take economic information from the market and turn it into a judgment about our work—or ourselves.Because maybe the estimate tells us something useful about the business.But I’m not sure our worth has any business being on it.Featured clip: Moneyball — used in Act Three as we get into how markets assign value, what they measure, and what they sometimes miss.Handshake music: Instrumental version of “Take On Me” — a small nod to entering the 80s.Episode artwork: Photograph by César Rincón.ResourcesThe Book Lessons From a Terrible PhotographerSupport the Show terriblephotographer.com/supportStay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)The Terrible Creative on InstagramPatrick Fore on InstagramEmail Me (Patrick Fore)Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.
- Aug 25, 202641 min
Photography - The Voice - What Do You Actually Want To Make? - Part Three
Office Hours with PatrickStuck on your website, portfolio, pricing, marketing, or business strategy?Office Hours is a one-on-one, 60-ish minute conversation to help you work through whatever you’re trying to figure out. No agenda. No curriculum. No pitch. Just honest feedback, thoughtful questions, and a fresh perspective.$99Learn more or book your session:https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hoursYou can buy the camera. You can learn the lighting. You can spend years mastering the technical side of photography until the camera finally gets out of the way.Then comes the harder question: What do you actually want to photograph?In the final episode of Photography: Gear, Craft & Voice, I’m talking about what happens when technical competence is no longer the problem—and you’re left alone with your own ideas, or the uncomfortable lack of them.We’ll talk about creative avoidance, why inspiration so easily turns into imitation, the strange difficulty of making work nobody asked for, and why your voice may have less to do with developing a “style” than paying attention to the things you can’t stop thinking about.Because eventually, the question stops being whether you know how to make the photograph.It becomes: What do you actually care about?ResourcesAPA (Advertising Photographers of America) Find your local chapter at apanational.orgThe Book Lessons From a Terrible PhotographerSupport the Show terriblephotographer.com/supportStay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)The Terrible Creative on InstagramPatrick Fore on InstagramEmail Me (Patrick Fore)Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.
- Aug 18, 202647 min
Photography - The Gear, The Craft, and The Voice - Part Two
Office Hours with PatrickStuck on your website, portfolio, pricing, marketing, or business strategy?Office Hours is a one-on-one, 60-ish minute conversation to help you work through whatever you’re trying to figure out. No agenda. No curriculum. No pitch. Just honest feedback, thoughtful questions, and a fresh perspective.$99Learn more or book your session:https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hoursThere is a quiet, infuriating moment every creator faces: looking at the LCD screen and realizing the image in front of you isn't even in the same conversation as the one living in your head.In Part Two of our series on Gear, Craft & Voice, Patrick Fore breaks down what it actually takes to close the gap between imagination and execution. From late-night isolation sessions trying to light reflective acoustic guitars to nearly blowing a high-stakes commercial architecture shoot by blindly following an online tutorial, this episode explores the unglamorous reality of building instinct.We look at why repetition without an audit is useless, how recipes differ from underlying principles, and the dangerous trap waiting for you at the top of technical execution.Key TakeawaysThe Comparison Ritual: How placing your raw work side-by-side with a target image strips away ego and isolates the only question that matters: "What's different?"The Audit Over Mindless Reps: Putting in "ten thousand hours" doesn't teach you anything if you aren't changing one variable at a time and auditing the result.Practice Without an Institutional Studio: You don't need five-figure gear or a commercial space to learn light. A kitchen mug, a single desk lamp, and a piece of foam board obey the exact same laws of physics.Recipes vs. Principles: Recipes sell certainty by encoding someone else’s controlled environment. Principles give you the framework to solve unfamiliar problems under live client pressure.The Dark Side of Craft: Technical capacity answers how, but it never touches why. Flawless execution can easily become a comfortable, expensive hiding place.ResourcesThe Book Lessons From a Terrible PhotographerSupport the Show terriblephotographer.com/supportStay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)The Terrible Creative on InstagramPatrick Fore on InstagramEmail Me (Patrick Fore)Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.
- Aug 11, 202640 min
Photography - The Gear, The Craft, and The Voice - Part One
Office Hours with PatrickStuck on your website, portfolio, pricing, marketing, or business strategy?Office Hours is a one-on-one, 60-ish minute conversation to help you work through whatever you’re trying to figure out. No agenda. No curriculum. No pitch. Just honest feedback, thoughtful questions, and a fresh perspective.Learn more or book your session:https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hoursPhotography: The Gear, The Craft & The Voice — Part OneEvery photographer inherits a definition of good before they've earned one. This episode is about where that definition actually comes from, why gear ends up being the evidence of it, and why the real question was never which camera to buy.Patrick walks through camera store tribalism, the teachers nobody asks to have (YouTubers, algorithms, magazines, the guy at the counter), a British portrait photographer who rewired how he thought about images during a COVID-era Clubhouse call, a viral coffee photo he's since made peace with, and why he was wrong to blame Canon for any of it. First of a three-part series on gear, craft, and voice.In this episode:The quiet neurosis of buying a new camera, and the specific lie it tells youWhy brand loyalty (Canon vs. Sony vs. Fuji vs. Leica) is never really about the gearThe trend history nobody wants to own: shallow depth of field, HDR, orange and teal, drone reveals, LUTs, AI skinTom Hoops and the conversations that happened on Clubhouse during lockdownA photo Patrick made that went semi-viral, and what he now understands about whyWhy "gear doesn't matter" and "gear matters" are both the wrong questionWhat actually changed his relationship to his own cameras, four to five years in the makingMentioned in this episode:Tom Hoops, portrait photographer — tomhoops.com / @tomhoops on InstagramPeter McKinnon — YouTubeCasey Neistat — YouTubeJared Polin (FroKnowsPhoto) — YouTubeResourcesAPA (Advertising Photographers of America) Find your local chapter at apanational.orgThe Book Lessons From a Terrible PhotographerSupport the Show terriblephotographer.com/supportStay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)The Terrible Creative on InstagramPatrick Fore on InstagramEmail Me (Patrick Fore)Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.
- Aug 4, 202649 min
Creep - You don't need a harder no. You need a better sentence.
Office Hours with PatrickStuck on your website, portfolio, pricing, marketing, or business strategy?Office Hours is a one-on-one, 60-ish minute conversation to help you work through whatever you’re trying to figure out. No agenda. No curriculum. No pitch. Just honest feedback, thoughtful questions, and a fresh perspective.Learn more or book your session:https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hoursA client says "we love these." Then they ask for more images, for the same money, and call it a collaboration. This episode is about what that word is actually doing to you, why the moment feels impossible to say no to, and why the fix was never confidence. It was having the sentence ready before you needed it.In this episodePatrick breaks down the psychology behind scope creep and the "collaboration" ask, drawing on Dan Ariely's market norms vs. social norms, the classic foot-in-the-door effect, and a scene from The Negotiator that changed how he thinks about saying no. Along the way: four types of clients who are all testing the same thing without knowing it, why a rigid system is actually what makes generosity possible, and why bringing up your contract after the shoot has already happened means something already went wrong.The three lines to saveThese are built to do the same three things every time: validate the ask, protect the scope, offer a real next step. Swap in your own numbers and your own voice, the shape is what matters, not the exact wording.At the proposal, before anything's shot: "We'll lock down these five hero shots. If we spot extra opportunities on the day, I'm happy to grab them, we'll just treat those as separate add-ons so it doesn't mess with today's scope."On set, when the ask shows up live: "Love that shot idea. Let's finish our main list first so we hit our schedule, and then I'll pull together a quick add-on price for the extras before we wrap."After delivery, when the compliment arrives with a bigger ask behind it: "I'm so glad the set landed. If you want to expand delivery to twenty images, I can open up the rest of the gallery for an extra [your rate]."Is it a real collaboration? The three-part testBefore you say yes to a trade instead of a fee, check for all three:Named upfront. Offered before the work happens, not as a consolation after the client can't hit their own number.Specific. Which posts, tagged how, to how many actual followers, not "some exposure."Reciprocal. Both sides chose it on purpose, not one side discovering it after delivery.If it shows up after the invoice as a replacement for the invoice, it's not a trade. It's the same ask wearing a nicer word.Referenced in this episodeDan Ariely, Predictably Irrational (market norms vs. social norms)Freedman & Fraser, 1966, the original foot-in-the-door compliance studyThe Negotiator (1998), starring Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey, "never say no to a hostage-taker" scene. ResourcesAPA (Advertising Photographers of America) Find your local chapter at apanational.orgThe Book Lessons From a Terrible PhotographerSupport the Show terriblephotographer.com/supportStay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)The Terrible Creative on InstagramPatrick Fore on InstagramEmail Me (Patrick Fore)Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.
- Jul 28, 202649 min
The Audit Part II - The Soul of the C-Stand - What does competence actually look like?
A lot of photographers assume it’s your portfolio. Your lighting. Your gear. Maybe your day rate.I’m not so sure anymore.A few weeks ago I spent three and a half days photographing hardware products in a twelve-by-fifteen room. White seamless. Capture One. Cardboard boxes. SKU spreadsheets. The kind of commercial job nobody posts on Instagram because it isn’t glamorous enough to be interesting.On the drive home after the third day, I got rear-ended sitting on the on-ramp of Interstate 15.The next morning I still had one day left to shoot, but my back had other plans.That experience forced me to rethink something I’ve been saying for years about professionalism, leadership, pricing, and what clients are actually paying us for.This episode is the follow-up to Episode 56, The Audit. That episode asked whether our work was replaceable. This one asks a different question:Are we?Along the way we talk about Photo Jail, why I strangely love my Canon AC adapter, the hidden physical labor of commercial photography, why leadership begins with understanding the jobs you’re asking other people to do, and why the best commercial photographers don’t just know how to make photographs—they know how to make sure the job survives when reality inevitably gets in the way.I also share why I think most photographers have a distorted view of this industry, what a nine-thousand-dollar commercial assignment actually looks like once the math is finished, and why I still think there’s something valuable about loading C-stands into the back of a Subaru before sunrise.Sometimes the most important lessons in photography aren’t learned behind the camera.Sometimes they’re learned in the parking lot after the shoot is over.In this episodeWhy I started calling one commercial assignment “Photo Jail”The hidden, unglamorous side of professional photographyGetting rear-ended during production week—and finishing the job anywayWhy leadership starts with understanding the work yourselfThe difference between being a boss and being someone your crew trustsWhy I think professionalism is really about building marginWhat a commercial photography budget actually looks like after the expensesWhy small commercial jobs deserve more respect than they getThe real meaning behind The Soul of the C-StandMentioned in this episodeEpisode 56 — The AuditThe Bear (FX), Season 2 – Garrett and Richie polishing forksCapture OneCanon EOS R5ResourcesThe Book Lessons From a Terrible PhotographerSupport the Show terriblephotographer.com/supportStay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)The Terrible Creative on InstagramPatrick Fore on InstagramEmail Me (Patrick Fore)Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.
- Jul 21, 20261h 0m
Good Faith - The Small Decisions That Destroy Photography Careers
Every creative career begins with an invisible handshake.Before the photographs exist, before the campaign launches, before the work is delivered, someone decides to trust you.In this episode, Patrick explores what happens when that trust is broken, beginning with North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson’s May 2026 press conference announcing the state’s lawsuit against Holly Christina Photography, a wedding photography company accused of defrauding more than 200 couples out of nearly $1 million through overbooking, undelivered work, and broken promises. Audio clips from that press conference are used throughout the episode. From there, the conversation becomes much more personal.Patrick shares the story of an early freelance assignment he never should have accepted, and how one difficult phone call in a 7-Eleven parking lot changed the way he thinks about professionalism forever.Because professionalism isn’t about never making mistakes.It’s about telling the truth before someone has to chase you for it.Key idea: Good faith isn’t believing nothing will go wrong. It’s the promise that when it does, you’ll remain reachable.ResourcesAPA (Advertising Photographers of America) Find your local chapter at apanational.orgThe BookLessons From a Terrible PhotographerSupport the Showterriblephotographer.com/supportStay ConnectedSubscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)The Terrible Creative on InstagramPatrick Fore on InstagramEmail Me (Patrick Fore)Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.
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About The Terrible Creative
The Terrible Creative is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative professionals working through the parts of the creative process no gear review or business course ever covers. Each episode is 30 to 40 minutes. Solo. Story-driven. Built around mental health, artistic identity, and what honest work costs in a career rewarding performance over truth. This is not a photography podcast about cameras, presets, or client strategy. This is a podcast about the inner experience of being a creative professional, made for the mid-career photographer or designer who has mastered the technical side but lost the thread. Hosted by Patrick Fore, commercial photographer, author, and former lead photographer and brand designer for Taylor Guitars. His work has appeared globally for clients like Nike, Petco, and Verizon. He built this show because none of the podcasts he found addressed the real problem. If you are a photographer or creative professional who feels competent on the outside and quietly lost on the inside, you are a Terrible Creative. This is your podcast.
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