The Terrible Creative

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 le...

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 c...

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...

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 was...

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...

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...

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...

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.<...

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 is being consumed by the machine that replaced you.

So I did what I always do. Stayed up too late, rebuilt half my website for an algorithm, and unpublished pages 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 years of executing other people's briefs can quietly atrophy a different kind of muscle. And what happens when you finally try to use it.

I...

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 a signal that isn't coming.

I talk about the Gilded Age, the algorithm, and a system so elegant it doesn't need to be cruel. I also name so...

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 eventually traded client work for consulting after discovering that helping photographers was the thing that actually got him out of bed.

In this conversation, we talk about what it means to...

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 the only proprietary data left that the machines can't touch.

It’s time to move from being a resource to being the source.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

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 the Scrivener - Herman Melville (1853)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T.S. Eliot (1915)<...

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 moment. Sixteen years old, a Mac G5, a cosmos built from scratch in a high school art room in Freeport Illinois. Two strangers from...

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 that night from two photographers, Michele Zousmer and Andrew Hertel, forced me to sit with a question I keep asking about other people's work...

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. A pastor in Iowa who said he doesn't feel fake — and then sent a follow-up voice note from a friend's house over Long Island iced teas that c...

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 showing. The polished portfolio. The confident host voice. The finished frame with the 400 failed shots cropped out.

This isn't an episode about lying...

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 broadcasting.

Using his own creative identity as the case study — the self-deprecation, the Terrible brand, the mid-sentence bail — Patrick traces the armor back to its origin: a thre...

There's a difference between being visible and being known. Most of us have confused the two.

In this episode, Patrick is sitting at a networking event in San Diego when a graphic designer asks him a question he wasn't ready for: "Who are you to write a book? To make a podcast?" What followed was a masterclass in what happens when radical transparency meets a closed receiver — and why no amount of clever explanation, diplomatic humor, or honest disclosure can open a door that's locked from the other side.

This is Part One of a fi...

The fear underneath every AI conversation in photography right now isn't really about the future. It's recognition.

In this episode, Patrick sits down with the hard question nobody in the industry is asking out loud: were we already making replaceable work before AI arrived? He traces the argument from a weekend with the Capture One leadership team, through his own portfolio audit, two unscripted phone calls with a working commercial photographer, a portrait session with a professor who had never been photographed, and a Christopher Anderson image made inside the White House that quietly pulls itself apart...

Something is changing.

This bonus episode is the announcement I've been putting off — partly because I wasn't sure how to say it, and partly because the timing is, as with most things in my life, sideways.

The Terrible Photographer is becoming The Terrible Creative.

Same show. Same voice. Same refusal to pretend I have it figured out. But the door is wider now — because the emails I've been getting for years have made something clear: the struggle we talk about here doesn't belong to photographers. It belongs to anyone trying to make honest work...

There's a moment in Season 11 of Alone where a man named Dub — forty days into the Canadian wilderness, starving, alone — watches a bull moose stand just out of reach on the other side of a freezing river. He has the shot. He has the skill. The river is just between him and the thing.

He watches it walk away. Then it starts to snow. Then he slips. Both boots go into the water.

"The moose was rubbing it in my face," he says.

Every freelancer knows that sequence. Not the moose — but the cascad...

Every job has a floor. A salary. A review cycle. Someone in authority who tells you you're doing fine, keep going.

Freelancing has none of that. There's no feedback mechanism that tells you you're okay. No quarterly check-in. No laminated menu that says: this is what we are, this is what we cost, this is what done looks like.

There's just the work. And then the silence after the work. And then waiting to see what the silence contains.

In this episode, I'm talking about the specific psychological cost of operating without a...

A photographer friend once gave me three words of advice that I've never been able to use: just be yourself.

Not because the advice is wrong. But because it assumes a stable, available self waiting underneath—one you can just step into when needed. For a lot of us in the creative industry, that self got covered over so gradually we didn't notice it happening.

In this episode, I'm getting into something I haven't talked about directly before: the mask. Not just the professional version—the competent, composed, commercially-legible persona we build to survive client work...

London. 1886. A respected doctor stands before a mirror and drinks a potion he swore he would only use once. He doesn’t grow horns or sprout claws. He simply becomes... lighter. The weight of Victorian morality, the heavy wool of his reputation—it just slides off his shoulders. The first time, it requires the chemistry. By the end, Hyde doesn’t wait for an invitation. He just arrives.

This is Episode 52 (Part 5 of the Heresies series)—where we say the things the photography industry would prefer you not think too hard about.

Today: We are putting...

I posted a question on Threads: "Where are you posting your images these days?"

The answers were scattered. Glass. Grainery. Pixelfed. Substack. Flickr, somehow. Very few said Instagram.

There is no home anymore.

Instagram was built by photographers, for photographers. Square format mimicking film. Filters mimicking darkroom techniques. A grid layout that functioned as a digital portfolio. For a while, it worked. Photographers got discovered. Built followings. Landed clients. Built careers.

Then Instagram decided it wasn't a photo-sharing app anymore.

They killed the chronological feed. Launched Reels. Made still...

It's 3 AM. You're scrolling through infomercials. A televangelist is selling "Miracle Spring Water" for $50—promising financial breakthroughs, healing, transformation. All you have to do is send money and believe.

Fast forward to 2026. A YouTube thumbnail: "This CAMERA changed EVERYTHING 📷🔥" Description: "Amazon affiliate links below."

Same hustle. Different spring water.

In this bonus heresy, we examine why gear influencers are the modern-day televangelists of photography—how they've built an entire industry around keeping you perpetually inadequate, how they've changed what we value when we look at photographs, and why most of them can't actually shoot.

Rochester, 1888. George Eastman releases the Kodak camera with a brilliant slogan: "You press the button, we do the rest." Serious photographers immediately panic, calling new users "Button-Pressers" and "Kodak Fiends." One writer declares photography dead: "When everyone is a photographer, then no one is an artist."

Same fear. Same argument. Different century.

This is Episode 2 of Heresies—where we say the things the photography industry would prefer you not think too hard about.

Today: Why your camera brand doesn't care if you're a good photographer. Why brand ambassadors are unpaid marketing de...

Most photographers drown in the edit.

Not because they can't see what's good. Because they can't choose what matters.

This episode is about the violence of editing—the courage it takes to kill good images, the ego that dies in the process, and why great portfolios are built on rhythm, not range.

I tell the story of a La Jolla shoot where I took 1,900 frames in two hours and couldn't figure out which ones to keep. About losing my sense of up and down. About the underwater feeling of staring at 300 good images an...

When a client says "I want exactly this," are they hiring you to execute their vision—or are they asking you to solve a problem they can't articulate?

This is the first episode in a five-part series called Heresies—where we say the uncomfortable things the industry doesn't want you to think too hard about.

In this episode: Why listening to your client might be killing your work. Why taste is a technical skill, not a preference. And the difference between being a problem-solver and being an expensive tripod.

We'll talk...

There's a woman in Bangkok who's been selling noodles from the same corner for 43 years. She turned down Bon Appétit. Not because she's shy. Because she didn't want to cook for strangers with expectations.

This episode started with a voicemail from Jason, a listener in North Carolina who shoots photos of his kids and has no interest in going pro. He called me out for ignoring non-professionals. And he was right.

What I didn't expect was how much his email would make me confront something I've been avoiding: I'm envious of a...

EPISODE DESCRIPTION:

Three hundred years. That's how long my family has been in America. Jamestown. Virginia. Colonial laborers. Post-Civil War homesteaders in Missouri. And not one of them—not one—ever owned anything that lasted.

In 1726, when a British clerk wrote "Fore" instead of "Fauer," my family's name changed. But the pattern didn't.

This episode isn't about New Year's resolutions or fresh starts. It's about lazy rivers, tubes, and boats. It's about realizing you're floating in a system you never chose—and that everyone in your family has been floating for centuries. It's about...

You've mastered the craft. You've built the business. You're successful. But you're still lonely. You're Joshua Bell in the subway—playing a Stradivarius while everyone walks past. You've taken off the costume, rejected the hierarchy, and you're still isolated.

So now what?

In the finale of "The Long Middle" series, Patrick explores sociologist Ray Oldenburg's concept of "The Third Space"—the pubs, coffee shops, and barbershops where community used to happen naturally. He examines why these spaces disappeared, how COVID delivered the final blow, and why digital spaces (Reddit, Discord) might be Third Space for some...

Why does a $600 light get dismissed while a $3,000 light gets respect, even when they produce identical results? Why do wedding photographers apologize by saying “I’m just a wedding photographer”? And why do we hide the work we’re actually doing because it’s not the “right” kind of work?

In Part 3 of The Long Middle series, Patrick examines the hierarchies that divide creative professionals, and admits his own complicity in enforcing them.

From a tense Zoom call about Profoto versus Godox, to being dismissed in Clubhouse rooms, to looking down o...

When Vanity Fair published Christopher Anderson’s portraits of the White House’s inner circle, the internet reacted to the politics. But as photographers, we need to look closer. We need to look at the framing.

In this bonus episode, Patrick Fore deconstructs the word "Framing." It’s not just the rule of thirds or leading lines—it’s authorship. It’s the decision to show truth over comfort, and humanity over "hero energy." Patrick opens up about his own struggle with "cowering" to the moment and why we’ve all become a little too good at making the wor...

Why do photographers wear so much black? Why do we feel confident on stage but panic at networking events? And why is it so hard to find real community in the creative industry?

In Part 2 of "The Long Middle" series, Patrick explores the costumes we wear—not just the black clothes and gear, but the professional roles and personas that keep us safe and isolated at the same time.

From 17th-century Japanese Kabuki theater to APA mixers in San Diego, this episode examines why we choose invisibility, what happens when we need established roles to fe...

In January 2007, Joshua Bell—one of the world's best violinists—played a $3.5 million Stradivarius in a Washington D.C. subway station. Over 1,000 people walked past. Only 7 stopped to listen. He made $32.

If you've ever felt like you're playing your heart out while everyone walks past... this episode is for you.

This is Part 1 of a 4-part series called "The Long Middle"—about that specific season in a creative life where you've mastered the skills, built the business, done everything "right"... but something still feels off.

Today's episode is about the loneliness that comes with e...

Belle Gibson faked cancer. The Stauffers rehomed their adopted son when the content became too difficult. Ruby Franke is currently sitting in a prison cell.

It’s easy to look at the monsters of the influencer economy and think, "I am nothing like them." But if you peel back the layers of how we document our own lives, the difference might be smaller than we’d like to admit.

In this episode, we dig into the "Curator's Disease"—the urge to professionalize our own existence. We look at how commercial production techniques have trickled down from a...

June 6, 1944. Robert Capa is wading through the freezing water of Omaha Beach. He captures the most important images of the 20th century, and technically, they are a disaster. They are blurry. They are grainy. They are imperfect. And that is exactly why they matter.

In this episode, Patrick explores the physics of light, the "hostage negotiation" of the exposure triangle, and why we are so terrified of grain. We look at how the market has colonized our vision, leading us to trade atmosphere for information and "safe" images for honest ones.

Most importantly, Patrick confesses...