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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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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.
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.
Have you ever sat in a high-stakes room, looked around at the expensive titles and corporate validation, and quietly wondered when the actual adults were going to arrive to take over?Eventually, you realize they aren't coming. Everyone is waiting on everyone else.In this episode, Patrick Fore breaks down the messy, internal reality of managing high-stakes commercial sets when self-doubt is screaming in your ear. From a midnight operational collapse in a mildew-ridden Chicago elementary school to the quiet realization that authority isn't announced—it’s just transferred—we look at why the room doesn't actually need your internal confidence. It just needs your presence.Audio ClipMark Watney (The Martian): "You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem. Then you solve the next one, and the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home."What We Cover in This Episode:The Silent Room Rotation: What happens when an agency producer panics, an interpreter doesn't show up, and a room full of people quietly decides you are the grown-up in charge.What Clients Actually Buy: Why a commercial day-rate isn't an invoice for an f-stop or a camera body—it’s a premium insurance policy to absorb chaos and shield the client's timeline.The Insecurity Tyrant: How to spot the director who treats authority like a volume knob, and why micromanaging your crew forces them to let you fail.Borrowing Nervous Systems: The psychological power of co-regulation on a stressful set. Why clients don't hire cocky geniuses; they hire stable anchors.The Universal Shift: Why the Impostor Filter isn't a photography problem. How teachers, parents, and business owners all navigate the exact moment responsibility arrives long before certainty does.Deep-Dive ReferencesThe Impostor Phenomenon (1978): Shifting the perspective on the foundational study by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, and exploring why the people who feel like frauds are often the least fraudulent minds in the room.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.
A friend of mine named Megan has spent more than a decade making beautiful, deeply human photographs of families. The kind of work that makes you feel something long after you’ve put the camera down. More than once I’ve told her she should be shooting commercial lifestyle campaigns.Every time I do, she smiles and says the same thing.“I couldn’t.”Not because she lacks talent.Because somewhere along the way, she decided that world belonged to someone else.That conversation sent me down a rabbit hole I wasn’t expecting. I started asking a deceptively simple question:How do you actually become a commercial photographer in 2026?The longer I looked for the answer, the stranger it became.This episode isn’t really about AI. AI simply exposed a much older problem. It’s about invisible career paths, inherited knowledge, and the possibility that commercial photography has spent decades telling origin stories without ever drawing a map.Maybe the next generation isn’t failing to find commercial photography.Maybe commercial photography is failing to find them.In This EpisodeWhy “How do I become a commercial photographer?” is much harder to answer than it should be.Why photographers like Megan may already have the eye for commercial work without realizing it.The surprising difference between a profession built on pathways and one built on folklore.Why AI isn’t the story, it’s the stress test.A challenge to every working commercial photographer: if we care about the future of this profession, maybe it’s time we start drawing the map.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.
This week, we are throwing a match into one of the most heavily guarded hiding places in the creative industry: financial trauma, pricing shame, and the business choices we make when the market goes cold. In this special "pod swap" episode, Patrick joins forces with Shelly Waldman from the Creative Campfire podcast. This isn't a sterile lecture on spreadsheets or corporate accounting pipelines. It is a raw, trench-level interrogation into why independent creators systematically undercharge, how childhood conditioning shapes our adult business anxiety, and what it actually takes to maintain your premium pricing integrity when you are trapped in a financial desert.Meet Shelly WaldmanShelly Waldman sits at the rare, hyper-focused apex of analytical data and pure creative execution. Before launching her commercial photography business in 2009, she earned a degree in economics and spent ten years working as a corporate financial analyst for Citibank. Today, through her commercial portfolio, her podcast Creative Campfire, and her educational platform at Creative Camp, she teaches creative entrepreneurs how to strip the emotional baggage out of their pricing models, look flatly at the data, and run a business that actually builds long-term wealth.Portfolio: shellywaldman.comEducation & Resources: creativecamp.proKey Moments & Deep Dives1. Blue-Collar Anchors vs. Corporate ExpectationsPatrick and Shelly dissect where our foundational money scripts are written. Patrick shares the memory of his father being laid off from a Midwestern factory job at age twelve, creating a permanent, tight-rope anxiety of living between "poor and doing okay." Shelly details growing up with stable, thirty-year career educators who couldn't fathom why their children would abandon secure office desks to chase volatile, high-risk creative fields like professional sports or freelance lifestyle photography.2. The $7 Latte and the Illusion of ControlWe have all heard the exhausting, surface-level financial advice telling struggling freelancers to cut out their daily premium coffee habits to balance their books. Patrick and Shelly flip the script on this narrative. In highly volatile, economically stressful environments, that expensive drink isn't a math error—it is a cigarette. It is a deliberate, calculated hit of micro-joy and environmental control when the larger financial structures around you are completely collapsing.3. The "Spicy Take" on Second Shooter ExploitationPatrick drops a heavy indictment on the direct-to-consumer wedding market. When a primary studio hires a second shooter for a ten-hour day, drops a five-hundred-dollar Venmo payment, and uses a one-sided contract to strip away the rookie's copyright and portfolio rights, it isn't "just business." It is photographers actively capitalizing on the ignorance of other photographers. They break down the legal realities of B2B transactions and why the industry standard day rate for second shooters has criminally stalled for over fifteen years.4. The Ballpark Trap: Walking Away in a Money DesertShelly breaks down a real-time contract negotiation drama from her recent work in London. A corporate charity client handed her an incredibly complex orchestra brief—complete with multiple conductors, split lightning keys, backstage portrait demands, and a requirement for perpetuity image usage across three separate companies. When they tried to slash her estimated rate completely in half, she walked away from the table—despite being in a dry market."If you reward the screaming toddler with a cupcake, you are punishing the entire creative industry. You teach the client that whatever an independent artist quotes, it can always be sliced in half."5. Gamifying the "No" vs. Rooting Out the TraumaWhen a creative professional is terrified to raise their rates, Shelly and Patrick deploy two completely different, equally necessary coaching frameworks:Shelly’s Data Method: Break down your cost of living into a hard, non-negotiable survival line. Then, increase your rates incrementally by fifty dollars on every single new inquiry until the market explicitly tells you "No." Run the 100 No Project and treat rejection like a game of Monopoly.Patrick’s Identity Method: Stop looking at the spreadsheet and look in the mirror. Identify the ghost inside your ego. Ask yourself if you are undercharging because your portfolio is weak, or because your family history has trained you to believe you don't deserve to hold capital.Surviving Another Day in 2026Patrick shares the whipla
We are doing something a little different this week. To give the live microphone a brief rest, we are pulling back the curtain on a project that has been built in the dark for months. In this episode, you are getting an exclusive, unedited listen to an entire chapter from my newly released audiobook: Chapter 14 — "Money Talks."This chapter cuts straight down to the bone of creative capitalism. It’s about the raw, visceral panic of quoting a number that makes your palms sweat, why the romanticized "starving artist" trope is an absolute lie, and how your pricing is a profound statement about your creative self-worth, not just a line item on an invoice.🎧 THE AUDIOBOOK IS OFFICIALLY OUT IN THE WILDThe wait is over. The complete audiobook version of Lessons From a Terrible Photographer is officially live and streaming onsite at Audible, Apple Books, and everywhere else you consume audio.If you want to grab your copy, listen to the rest of the book, or check out what people are saying, head directly to the link below:👉 Get the Audiobook Here: theterriblecreative.com/the-bookIn This Chapter:The Starbucks Recalibration: The story of the first time I quoted a five-figure rate ($32,000) that made my hands sweat in Irvine, California—and the epiphany that followed.The Trust Fund Myth: Why the "starving artist" romance loses its appeal the exact second your electricity gets turned off, and who actually invented that narrative.The $500 Downtown LA Disaster: A painful look back at my early freelancing days on Upwork, lugging backgrounds up thirty flights of stairs, and realizing my business was just a very expensive hobby.The Discount Photographer Death Spiral: The exact self-perpetuating psychological trap that keeps talented creatives broke, resentful, and suffocated.The Intention Effect: How walking away from a corporate salary at Taylor Guitars forced my brain's Reticular Activating System to prioritize non-negotiable financial targets.The Freedom Equation: Why financial stability isn't for "sellouts"—it is the literal foundation that gives you the breathing room to take true artistic risks.🪵 NEXT WEEK: Money Shame & Trauma with Shelly WaldmanThis audiobook drop is the exact intellectual foundation for where this show is heading next week. Next week, we are continuing our dive into the financial muck with a massive pod-swap conversation featuring Shelly Waldman from the Creative Campfire podcast.We are leaving the dry business strategies at the door and getting entirely real about money trauma, freelance precarity, and what happens when an empty inbox makes you feel like a failure as a human being.Go grab the audiobook, digest Chapter 14, and brace yourself for next week.Connect With the Show:Audiobook Links: theterriblecreative.com/the-bookMain Website & Archive: theterriblecreative.comEmail is Always Open: Send your thoughts, questions, or unfiltered hate mail directly through the link in the show notes. I read everything.Stay curious. Stay courageous. Stay terrible.
She said two words and I haven't stopped thinking about them since.This episode started at an APA event in La Mesa, in an artist's studio, in a conversation with a commercial photographer who's doing everything right. Personal work that matters, cold pitches going out every day, a real strategy executed with discipline. I asked how it was going."We'll see."This one is about that phrase. What it actually means to operate a creative business in 2026, where the feedback loops are fast, the wins are public, and the silence feels personal even when it isn't. About confidence as a product people sell you. About the gap between effort and outcome that nobody's content calendar accounts for. And about a camera I had to sell on Facebook Marketplace, and what it felt like to hand it to a stranger on my front porch.Your marketing not working isn't a referendum on your talent. Sometimes it's just the weather.In This EpisodeAPA (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 InstagramPodcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.
There is a version of this job that looks incredible from the outside. The gear. The clients. The portfolio. What nobody sees is what it costs to produce it.In this episode I'm talking about the part of the creative life nobody puts in the brochure. What it actually means to be a professional. Not the romantic version. The real one. Where you photograph a CEO with a fractured finger, shoot a full day with walking pneumonia, and drive to Los Angeles at 4am for a job you agreed to six months ago when it seemed manageable.The amateur has the luxury of the craft. The professional has the obligation of it. And nobody tells you that from the outside.This one is about divided focus, muscle memory, and the strange, specific capacity to override every biological alarm you have because there is a job to do and you are the only one who can do it.Lessons From a Terrible PhotographerSupport the showSubscribe to Pub NotesTerrible Photographer on InstagramPatrick Fore on InstagramPodcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Episode photography from Adobe Stock and Unsplash. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.
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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