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 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.

Patrick

The Book Lessons From a Terrible Photographer

The Terrible Creative on Instagram

Patrick Fore on Instagram

Email Me (Patrick Fore)

Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.

-----------------------
Office Hours with Patrick

Stuck 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.

$99
Learn more or book your session:

https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours

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 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.

Resources

The Book Lessons From a Terrible Photographer

Support the Show terriblephotographer.com/support

Stay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)

The Terrible Creative on Instagram

Patrick Fore on Instagram

Email 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.

-----------------------
Office Hours with Patrick

Stuck 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.

$99
Learn more or book your session:

https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours

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 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?

Resources

APA (Advertising Photographers of America) Find your local chapter at apanational.org

The Book Lessons From a Terrible Photographer

Support the Show terriblephotographer.com/support

Stay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)

The Terrible Creative on Instagram

Patrick Fore on Instagram

Email 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.

-----------------------
Office Hours with Patrick

Stuck 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.

$99
Learn more or book your session:

https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours

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 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 Takeaways

• The 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.

Resources

The Book Lessons From a Terrible Photographer

Support the Show terriblephotographer.com/support

Stay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)

The Terrible Creative on Instagram

Patrick Fore on Instagram

Email 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.

-----------------------
Office Hours with Patrick

Stuck 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.

$99
Learn more or book your session:

https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours

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, 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 you
• Why brand loyalty (Canon vs. Sony vs. Fuji vs. Leica) is never really about the gear
• The trend history nobody wants to own: shallow depth of field, HDR, orange and teal, drone reveals, LUTs, AI skin
• Tom Hoops and the conversations that happened on Clubhouse during lockdown
• A photo Patrick made that went semi-viral, and what he now understands about why
• Why "gear doesn't matter" and "gear matters" are both the wrong question
• What actually changed his relationship to his own cameras, four to five years in the making

Mentioned in this episode:

• Tom Hoops, portrait photographer — tomhoops.com / @tomhoops on Instagram
• Peter McKinnon — YouTube
• Casey Neistat — YouTube
• Jared Polin (FroKnowsPhoto) — YouTube

Resources

APA (Advertising Photographers of America) Find your local chapter at apanational.org

The Book Lessons From a Terrible Photographer

Support the Show terriblephotographer.com/support

Stay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)

The Terrible Creative on Instagram

Patrick Fore on Instagram

Email 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.

-----------------------
Office Hours with Patrick

Stuck 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.

$99
Learn more or book your session:

https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours

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 "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 save

These 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:

On set, when the ask shows up live: 

After delivery, when the compliment arrives with a bigger ask behind it: 

Is it a real collaboration? The three-part test

Before 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 episode

• Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational (market norms vs. social norms)
• Freedman & Fraser, 1966, the original foot-in-the-door compliance study
• The Negotiator (1998), starring Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey, "never say no to a hostage-taker" scene. 

Resources

APA (Advertising Photographers of America) Find your local chapter at apanational.org

The Book Lessons From a Terrible Photographer

Support the Show terriblephotographer.com/support

Stay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)

The Terrible Creative on Instagram

Patrick Fore on Instagram

Email 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.

-----------------------
Office Hours with Patrick

Stuck 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.

$99
Learn more or book your session:

https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours

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 episode

• Why I started calling one commercial assignment “Photo Jail”
• The hidden, unglamorous side of professional photography
• Getting rear-ended during production week—and finishing the job anyway
• Why leadership starts with understanding the work yourself
• The difference between being a boss and being someone your crew trusts
• Why I think professionalism is really about building margin
• What a commercial photography budget actually looks like after the expenses
• Why small commercial jobs deserve more respect than they get
• The real meaning behind The Soul of the C-Stand

Mentioned in this episode

• Episode 56 — The Audit
• The Bear (FX), Season 2 – Garrett and Richie polishing forks
• Capture One
• Canon EOS R5

Resources

The Book Lessons From a Terrible Photographer

Support the Show terriblephotographer.com/support

Stay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)

The Terrible Creative on Instagram

Patrick Fore on Instagram

Email 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.

-----------------------
Office Hours with Patrick

Stuck 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.

$99
Learn more or book your session:

https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours

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.

Resources

APA (Advertising Photographers of America) Find your local chapter at apanational.org

The Book

Lessons From a Terrible Photographer

Support the Show

terriblephotographer.com/support

Stay Connected

Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)

The Terrible Creative on Instagram

Patrick Fore on Instagram

Email 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.

-----------------------
Office Hours with Patrick

Stuck 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.

$99
Learn more or book your session:

https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours

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 Clip

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 References

• The 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.

Resources

APA (Advertising Photographers of America) Find your local chapter at apanational.org

The Book

Lessons From a Terrible Photographer

Support the Show

terriblephotographer.com/support

Stay Connected

Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)

The Terrible Creative on Instagram

Patrick Fore on Instagram

Email 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.

-----------------------
Office Hours with Patrick

Stuck 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.

$99
Learn more or book your session:

https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours

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 Episode

• Why “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.

Resources

APA (Advertising Photographers of America) Find your local chapter at apanational.org

The Book

Lessons From a Terrible Photographer

Support the Show

terriblephotographer.com/support

Stay Connected

Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)

The Terrible Creative on Instagram

Patrick Fore on Instagram

Email 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.

-----------------------
Office Hours with Patrick

Stuck 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.

$99
Learn more or book your session:

https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours