The Terrible Creative

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 t...

Episode 80 — Worth Photographers 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...

You 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 alon...

There 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 re...

Photography: The Gear, The Craft &  The Voice — Part One Every 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, algorit...

A 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 episode Patrick breaks down the psychology behind scope creep and the "collabor...

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....

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 Photo...

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 screa...

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 a...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Something shifted last week. Not dramatically. Quietly, the way things in this industry tend to change — while you're working, while you're trying to keep the phone ringing. Google's AI Mode is rewriting how clients find photographers. The search box that used to send people to your website now answers their question and keeps them inside Google. The content you spent years building to get found i...

There is a man standing in a clearing in Arkansas with a yellow guitar, singing about insulin prices to nobody in particular. Three million people found him. Not because of the production value. Because he was saying the thing. This episode is about the gap most professional creatives never talk about — the distance between the skills that pay your rent and the thing you actually have to say. How...

There's a composite photographer in this episode named Nate. His details have been changed. His situation has not. This episode is about the creator economy — what it actually costs, who it was actually built for, and the quiet compromise most creative professionals are making every day. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just quietly, in parking garages, watching the blue light of a phone, waiting for...

Terrible Conversations w/ Tom Wright Tom Wright is a photography consultant based in Burnley, UK. He calls himself a phototherapist, and no, he's not a doctor. But photographers that work with him tend to leave unstuck. Tom started in 2011 teaching photographers how to shoot Impossible Project instant film. From there he shot weddings for over a decade, moved into commercial photography, and event...

We’ve spent a century conditioning ourselves to believe that if we aren’t "producing," we aren't "valuable." But in 2026, the machines can out-produce us all. This episode is about The Great Decoupling —the moment we stop being high-end processors and start being the source. We dive into the "Productivist Fallacy," why Maya and Chris are grieving the loss of their utility, and why your "Why" is th...

Getting good at your craft is supposed to be the goal. But for a lot of us, competence became the cage. This episode is about the feedback loop nobody warns you about: the better you get, the harder it is to leave. And what we build around the good thing to protect it. Also, some honesty about why I called this show "Terrible" that I haven't said out loud before. MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Bartleby...

Where does creative obsession actually come from? Not how to manufacture it. Not how to find it on a vision board. Where it actually lives. How it grows underground without your permission. And what it sounds like when it finally tries to break through. This episode is the follow up to Episode 61: Obsessed. If you haven't listened to that one yet, start there. This week I go back to a specific mom...

What separates a photographer who makes important work from one who just makes good photos? It might not be talent. It might not be gear. It might be something harder to name and harder to fake. This week I walked into an APA Peer-to-Peer Photo Book Critique in San Diego with six copies of my own book, a smug attitude, and some assumptions that didn't survive the first thirty minutes. What I saw t...

This is the last one. Four episodes. Four quadrants. Four different ways of asking the same question: who are you — really — when nobody's grading you? In the final episode of the Johari Window series, Patrick texts eight people the same question without defining the word first. A photographer in Texas who's bored at events but wants the money. A friend who performs down to what shoes she puts on....

Episode 59: "The Facade" The Johari Window Series — Part Three Some weeks Patrick knows exactly why he's making this podcast. Other weeks he almost quits. This week he almost quit. In Episode 59, Patrick pulls back the frame on the third quadrant of the Johari Window — the Facade — and what it actually costs creative professionals to maintain the gap between what they show and what's driving the s...

Everyone around you already knows. Your clients see it. The people who've worked alongside you see it. The people who love you have probably tried to name it — in ways you found reasons to dismiss. In Episode 58, Patrick continues the Johari Window series by moving from the Arena into the most uncomfortable quadrant: the Blind Spot. Not the things you're hiding. The things you don't know you're br...