Explore every episode of the podcast The Terrible Creative
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Photography - The Gear, The Craft, and The Voice - Part Two | 18 Aug 2026 | 00:47:21 | |
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 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.
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 Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. | |||
| Photography - The Gear, The Craft, and The Voice - Part One | 11 Aug 2026 | 00:40:53 | |
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 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:
Mentioned in this episode:
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 Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. | |||
| Creep - You don't need a harder no. You need a better sentence. | 04 Aug 2026 | 00:49:32 | |
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 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.
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.
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: "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]."
Before you say yes to a trade instead of a fee, check for all three:
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.
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 Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. | |||
| The Audit Part II - The Soul of the C-Stand - What does competence actually look like? | 28 Jul 2026 | 00:49:18 | |
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 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
Mentioned in this episode
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 Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. | |||
| Good Faith - The Small Decisions That Destroy Photography Careers | 21 Jul 2026 | 01:00:59 | |
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 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 Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. | |||
| The Imposter Filter - What If Confidence Was Never the Requirement For Success? | 14 Jul 2026 | 00:27:47 | |
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 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.
What We Cover in This Episode:
Deep-Dive References
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 Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. | |||
| The Missing Map - How To Become A Commercial Photographer in 2026 | 07 Jul 2026 | 00:42:04 | |
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 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
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 Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. | |||
| Let's Talk Money (Again) - A Terrible Conversation with Shelly Waldman | 30 Jun 2026 | 01:45:45 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 Waldman Shelly 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.
Key Moments & Deep Dives 1. Blue-Collar Anchors vs. Corporate Expectations Patrick 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 Control We 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 Exploitation Patrick 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 Desert Shelly 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 Trauma When a creative professional is terrified to raise their rates, Shelly and Patrick deploy two completely different, equally necessary coaching frameworks:
Surviving Another Day in 2026 Patrick shares the whiplash reality of his first few years of complete independence: bringing in $123,000 in 2024, only to watch the entire client pipeline vanish into complete silence throughout 2025, forcing him to stand on his front porch and sell his backup camera gear just to cover his California rent. The underlying consensus of this pod swap is simple: if you are operating an independent creative business in 2026, navigating the structural shifts of AI and platform manipulation, and simply managing to survive to shoot another frame—you get the gold star. Survival is a badge of honor. Connect With the Show:
| |||
| Money Talks - Audiobook Preview: The psychology of undercharging and how financial stability creates true creative freedom. | 23 Jun 2026 | 00:43:18 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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."
🪵 NEXT WEEK: Money Shame & Trauma with Shelly Waldman
Stay curious. Stay courageous. Stay terrible. | |||
| We’ll See - The quiet anxiety of marketing | 16 Jun 2026 | 00:39:50 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 Episode 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 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. | |||
| Playing Hurt - How Professional Creatives Perform at Full Capacity When Everything Goes Wrong | 09 Jun 2026 | 00:39:51 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 Photographer Terrible Photographer on Instagram Podcast 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. | |||
| Death Grip - Google AI Just Changed How Clients Find You. Here's What It Can't Replace. | 02 Jun 2026 | 00:25:03 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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'd spent months on. This episode is about that night. About what it costs to hold the wrong things too tight. About a portrait subject who sat in her car for ten minutes before she could walk through my studio door — and what happened in the room after she did. And about the part of this work that no platform update, no search algorithm, no AI announcement has ever been able to touch. The ninety percent is window dressing. This episode is about the ten. Resources and Links Lessons From A Terrible Photographer (The Book) https://www.terriblephotographer.com/the-book Support the show https://www.terriblephotographer.com/support Subscribe to Pub Notes, the newsletter https://the-terrible-photographer.kit.com/223fe471fb The Terrible Creative on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/terriblephotographer/ Patrick Fore on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/patrickfore/ 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 | |||
| Mute - You've Spent Years Getting Good. Do You Have Anything Left to Say? | 26 May 2026 | 00:44:16 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 talk about Jesse Welles, Oliver Anthony, a series of images I made in 2024 that landed in silence, and why Marcus Aurelius titled his most important work "To Himself." This one took a while to say out loud.
Jesse Welles — "War Isn't Murder" Watch on YouTube wellesmusic.com Jesse Welles on Bandcamp Oliver Anthony — "Rich Men North of Richmond" Watch on YouTube oliveranthonymusic.com CNN News Coverage — Sandy Hook Elementary School, December 14, 2012 Watch on YouTube Used for editorial purposes.
Lessons From a Terrible Photographer
theterriblecreative.com/support
Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter) The Terrible Creative on Instagram Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions | |||
| Clown Nose - What the Creator Economy Actually Costs a Working Creative | 19 May 2026 | 00:43:48 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours There's a composite photographer in this episode named Nate. His details have been changed. His situation has not.
I talk about the Gilded Age, the algorithm, and a system so elegant it doesn't need to be cruel. I also name something I've been avoiding saying out loud for a while. If this one lands close, send it to someone who needs to hear it. Nate is a composite character. Details altered to protect identity.
Email is always open. Questions, thoughts, hate mail. I respond to everything. Link above. The Terrible Creative is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Images Licensed through Adobe Stock. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.
| |||
| Terrible Conversations - Tom Wright - Tom Wright on Creative Work and Photography | 14 May 2026 | 01:07:08 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 develop a style versus chasing trends, why AI is eating the bottom of the photography market, and what most photographers are missing when they look at their own work. We also spend way too long talking about British food. You're welcome. What we get into:
Find Tom at bytomw.com and on Instagram at @bytomw. Consultations are free. Go get unstuck. ----- THE BOOK Lessons From a Terrible Photographer is out now. It’s part memoir, part field guide, and part honest conversation about what it actually costs to build a creative life. If this episode landed, the book goes deeper into finding the "Source" when the "Resource" runs dry.
Email is always open. Questions, thoughts, hate mail. I respond to everything. Link above. The Terrible Creative is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Images Licensed through Adobe Stock. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California. | |||
| Stop Being A Tool - Why Creatives Were Never Just Useful | 12 May 2026 | 00:40:15 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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
THE BOOK Lessons From a Terrible Photographer is out now. It’s part memoir, part field guide, and part honest conversation about what it actually costs to build a creative life. If this episode landed, the book goes deeper into finding the "Source" when the "Resource" runs dry.
Email is always open. Questions, thoughts, hate mail. I respond to everything. Link above. The Terrible Creative is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Images Licensed through Adobe Stock. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California. | |||
| The Cost of Getting Good - The Cost of Getting Good - How Success Becomes a Creative Trap for Creatives | 05 May 2026 | 00:31:01 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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) Robert Berglas - Self-Handicapping research THE BOOK Lessons From a Terrible Photographer is out now. It's part memoir, part field guide, and part honest conversation about what it actually costs to build a creative life. If this episode landed, the book goes deeper. Get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Terrible-Photographer-Photography-Probably/dp/B0GRGLYKYS/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0 LINKS Website: http://terriblephotographer.com Support the show: https://www.terriblephotographer.com/support Subscribe to Pub Notes: https://the-terrible-photographer.kit.com/223fe471fb Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terriblephotographer/ Patrick on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/patrickfore/ Email is always open. Questions, thoughts, hate mail. I respond to everything. Link above. The Terrible Creative is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California. | |||
| Subterranean - On Obsession, Part II | 28 Apr 2026 | 00:42:37 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 the Art Institute of Chicago who saw something I didn't. And then the long, complicated story of what happened to that signal when the framework got louder than I did. We also get into David Lynch, Jon Batiste, the 19th century psychology of monomania, and a John Updike line that I think is one of the most honest things ever said about what separates artists from entertainers. Clips used in this episode: David Lynch on his childhood memory that inspired Blue Velvet Jon Batiste on being misunderstood his first year at Juilliard Music: OK Go, Obsession Lessons From A Terrible Photographer is available now on Amazon. Get your copy here Website Support the show Subscribe to Pub Notes, the newsletter Terrible Photographer on Instagram Patrick Fore on Instagram Email: patrick@terriblephotographer.com 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. | |||
| Obsessed - Finding Your Creative Voice When the Algorithm Rewards Everyone Else's | 21 Apr 2026 | 00:40:55 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 but rarely ask about my own. Who is this for? And what drove you to make it? This episode is about obsession. What it looks like when it's real. What it costs. And what it means when you've been swimming in borrowed obsessions long enough that you stop noticing. People and work mentioned in this episode: Michele Zousmer, documentary photographer. Her Irish Travellers project is some of the most honest and important photography I've seen in years. Website: michelezousmer.com Instagram: @michelezousmerphoto Andrew Hertel, fine art nature photographer based in San Diego. His Japan book White Silence was made in a single day in Hokkaido. It shows. Website: andrewhertel.com Instagram: @andrewjameshertel This week's clip is from @dishcreates on YouTube, talking about choosing a new artistic obsession. Worth your time. Lessons From A Terrible Photographer is available now on Amazon. Get your copy here: https://a.co/d/0aqcL8Rq Website: terriblephotographer.com Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. | |||
| The Unknown - The Version of Yourself Nobody Has Seen Yet | 14 Apr 2026 | 00:42:59 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 changed everything. Not one person said they don't perform. Not one. The Unknown is the fourth quadrant. In the original model it was framed as a limitation — territory nobody has access to. Patrick thinks that's the wrong way to look at it. Especially for creatives. Especially for people making personal work in the gaps between the jobs that pay the rent. This episode is about the version of yourself that exists underneath all the other versions. The one that neither you nor anyone else has fully seen yet. The one that isn't always good. Isn't always safe. Isn't always received. And why you might make something from there anyway. In this episode: Eight people, one question, no definition provided. What performing actually means when you ask people who have been doing it their whole lives. The pastor who works every day to keep two versions of himself close enough to touch. The stylist Patrick hired because he fell for the full version of her on Instagram — and what the transaction cost. The irony of finding more of yourself in a podcast garage than in a building founded on the radical idea that humans should show up whole. The serial killer problem and the Pokemon Go executive — and the question neither of them can answer. Why the Johari Window isn't a self-help tool. It's a mirror. And mirrors show you everything. The 16 year old, the 21 year old, the 31 year old — and who Patrick has been making this for all along. The Johari Window — the complete series: Episode 57 — The Glass House: The Arena. Visibility versus being known. Episode 58 — The Tell: The Blind Spot. What everyone around you already knows. Episode 59 — The Facade: What you hide. What it costs. Episode 60 — The Unknown: The version of yourself that doesn't exist yet. And why you make something anyway. On Harrington: Back in episode one Patrick pushed back on the model. Said the Arena requires two people. That you can't open the door alone and expect to be known. He still believes that. But Harrington was right about the window itself. It's neutral. It's just glass. It shows you what's there. It doesn't tell you which parts are good and which are dangerous. It doesn't sort the rooms for you. What you do with what you see — that's on you. If this series landed somewhere: Email Patrick. He reads everything and responds to most of it. The emails that cost something to send are the ones he remembers longest. patrick@terriblephotographer.com Connect: Website: terriblephotographer.com The Terrible Creative is 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 a garage in San Diego, California. | |||
| The Facade - The Gap Between What You Show and What's Actually Driving the Work | 07 Apr 2026 | 00:45:58 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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. It's about omission. And about what happens when you build a professional identity around a creative practice that has no letter grade, no client approval, no clean signal telling you whether what you're making is landing or disappearing into silence. Patrick talks about Episode 7 — the color theory episode where he ran out of ideas and made something anyway. About the specific loneliness of having no one to call mid-crisis who has the context to help. About talking creative decisions through with AI because that's what the forest looks like sometimes. About the analytics graph that will eventually reduce this episode — this specific vulnerable, costly, self-inflicted colonoscopy of an episode — to a data point. And about why he kept walking anyway. In this episode: The almost-abandoned Johari series — what Patrick was going to make instead and what made him stay. The Facade as omission — how showing only the product accidentally creates a culture of impostors. The feedback loop problem — why the podcast is the hardest creative work Patrick has ever done to measure, and what his brain does in the absence of data. The AI collaborator admission — the specific loneliness of having context nobody else has. The difference between performed vulnerability and actual vulnerability — and why Patrick monitors that line constantly. The color theory episode — what episode 7 actually proved about whether the podcast could survive without a plan. The forest — the dim flickering light, the disappearing trail, and the thing that terrifies Patrick more than getting lost. The Johari Window — where we are: Episode 57 — The Glass House: The Arena. Visibility versus being known. The three words that describe this episode: Bleeding. Silence. Walking. If this one felt uncomfortably familiar: That's the episode working. Email Patrick. He reads everything. Some weeks your email is the only signal he gets that any of this is landing. No pressure. But also — no pressure. Connect: Website: terriblephotographer.com The Terrible Creative is 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 a garage in San Diego, California. | |||
| The Tell — Self-Handicapping, and What Everyone Around You Already Knows | 31 Mar 2026 | 00:44:04 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 three-bedroom house in Freeport, Illinois, a dinner table where the competition was already over before it started, and a crayon surrender he signed before he was old enough to know what surrender meant. This episode is about the system you built to survive. Why it made sense when you built it. And why it might be costing you more than it's protecting you now. In this episode: The specific look Alycia gives when Patrick abandons his own story mid-sentence — and what it means that he smiles instead of getting defensive. Steven Berglas and the Harvard research on self-handicapping — why capable people undermine themselves before anyone else can, and why success doesn't fix it. The sociometer — Mark Leary's theory about the internal gauge that monitors social acceptance in real time, and why most of ours are still calibrated for rooms we left twenty years ago. The two kinds of armor: lead and chrome. Why one makes you invisible and the other makes you blinding — and why both are running the same old software. Brian, the coloring book, and the crayon surrender. The Katie problem — what it means to be fully seen, how rare it actually is, and what the armor has to do with why it's so hard to find. The Johari Window — where we are: Last episode: The Arena — what you show the world, and why being visible isn't the same as being known. This episode: The Blind Spot — what everyone else can see that you can't. Coming up: The Facade, The Unknown, and the negotiation between all four. If this one landed somewhere uncomfortable: That's the episode working correctly. Email Patrick. He reads everything and responds to most of it — especially the ones that cost something to send. Connect: Website: terriblephotographer.com The Terrible Creative is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Episode title and subtitle: "The Tell" The Johari Window Part Two — What Everyone Around You Already Knows | |||
| The Glass House - Visibility, the Johari Window, and Why Being Seen Isn't the Same as Being Known | 24 Mar 2026 | 00:33:36 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 five-part series on the Johari Window — a psychological model built in the 1950s to map the gap between what we show, what we hide, what others see, and what nobody knows yet. Patrick uses it as a lens to examine what it actually means to be seen as a creative professional in an attention economy that rewards the performance of transparency without any mechanism for checking the real thing. Also in this episode: why Zach Galifianakis crying at his sister's wedding is the most honest thing in this conversation, what Jerry Seinfeld gets wrong about talent, and what it costs to make the self-deprecating joke when the room can't receive you. In this episode: The networking event that started this whole series — and the question that hasn't left Patrick alone since. The Johari Window, explained by an organizational psychologist named Erin over coffee. Why the Arena isn't just built by what you put out — and what happens when the receiver can't take it in. Zach Galifianakis, his sister's wedding, and five hundred people who thought grief was a bit. The mom joke, what it cost, and why Patrick stopped making it. The Johari Window — the four quadrants: The Arena — what you know about yourself that others know too. The Blind Spot — what others can see that you can't. The Facade — what you know but keep hidden. The Unknown — what neither you nor anyone else has figured out yet. If this episode hit something: This is Part One of five. The series continues with the Blind Spot, the Facade, the Unknown, and the negotiation between all four. Subscribe so you don't miss it. And if you've ever been in a room where no arrangement of words was going to make it land — email Patrick. He reads everything. Connect: Website: terriblephotographer.com The Terrible Creative is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound. Episode photography from Adobe Stock. Recorded from a garage in San Diego, California. | |||
| The Audit - Was Your Work Already Replaceable Before AI Arrived? | 17 Mar 2026 | 00:54:57 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 at the seams. This isn't an episode about AI killing photography. It's about what AI is making visible — and what that means for the work you make next.
The conversation about AI and photography has been happening at the wrong altitude. Markets, economics, job security — those are real questions. But they're the surface conversation. The thing underneath is harder: what were you making before AI arrived, and why? This episode starts in Paris, 1839 — the moment photography was supposed to kill painting — and ends with a question you probably haven't let yourself ask yet. Along the way: — A weekend with part of the leadership team at Capture One, and why Patrick came home more excited than afraid — The portfolio audit: scrolling back through his own work with new eyes, and what Gemini did with one of his best-performing images in four minutes — Two unscripted phone calls with commercial photographer Morgan Turner — including the two words that said everything — A portrait session with a professor in her fifties who had never been photographed, and what that responsibility actually looks like — Christopher Anderson's White House portraits, a light switch, and why AI would have removed it — The difference between a mistake and a strategic sacrifice — Why the making might matter more than the image
Christopher Anderson — White House Portrait Series Shot for Magnum Photos during the Trump administration. Worth finding and sitting with. magnum photos.com Capture One Professional photo editing software and the people building the tools photographers will use next. captureone.com The Long Middle Series If this episode landed, go back to Episode 40. It's the first in a four-part series on creative loneliness — what happens when you're good at what you do and something still feels off. It connects directly to everything discussed here.
Morgan Turner — Commercial Photographer, Cranbrook BC Website: mturnerphoto.com Instagram: @mturnerphoto
Photo by Teslariu Mihai Instagram: @photosbymihai
📖 The Book — Lessons From a Terrible Photographer terriblephotographer.com/the-book ☕ Support the Show terriblephotographer.com/support 📬 Pub Notes — The Newsletter the-terrible-photographer.kit.com/223fe471fb 📷 Patrick on Instagram instagram.com/patrickfore 🎙 The Terrible Creative on Instagram instagram.com/terriblephotographer 📧 Email Patrick patrick@terriblephotographer.com
Have thoughts on this episode? Did the audit hit different than you expected? Did you find an image in your portfolio that survived it — or one that didn't? Email patrick@terriblephotographer.com — he reads everything. | |||
| Widening The Frame - Welcome to the Terrible Creative | 15 Mar 2026 | 00:28:47 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 in a world that keeps asking why you bother. In this episode I talk about why the name was right when it started, why it stopped fitting, and a handwritten letter from a ceramicist in Vermont that I've been carrying around in my bag for eight months. I also talk about the Impressionists, a twenty-two-year-old kid in Los Angeles who told me my work was terrible, and a brand manager who had feelings about a throw pillow. Oh — and the book is done. Lessons From a Terrible Photographer is real and you can buy it right now. MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
LINKS
The Terrible Creative is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California. | |||
| Cosmic Cruelty - Freelancing, Isolation & Why the Universe Feels Like It’s Against You. | 10 Mar 2026 | 00:42:19 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 cascade. The opportunity that was real and unreachable. The ethical choice that costs you anyway. The universe punctuating the loss with weather. And then, because it's not done with you yet, the small stupid thing that compounds everything. This episode is about the forces nobody puts in the brochure. Not the craft — you already have that. The River. The Weather. The Wet Boots. And the specific, invisible loneliness of navigating all of it while the rest of the world has no idea what the weather is like where you're standing. We're not talking about failure. We're talking about terrain. This episode is for anyone in the early years — still building, still surviving, still making camp on days when the moose walked away and it started snowing. In this episode: The selection process for Alone — and why the skills are the entry fee, not the game. The River, the Weather, and the Wet Boots — three invisible forces the portfolio review doesn't measure. Apophenia — why your brain invents a tiger when three clients ghost you in a row. The Zeigarnik Effect and why there are no days off, only hours off. The specific loneliness of people who love you but can't follow you into the room where the hard thing lives. Why the freelancers who last stopped measuring themselves against the whole game. And what witness actually costs — and why it's sometimes the only floor available. Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound & Blue Dot Sessions. Episode photography from Adobe Stock & Unsplash. Recorded from the garage in San Diego, California. 🌐 terriblephotographer.com | |||
| The Cliff - Why Freelancing Has No Floor | 03 Mar 2026 | 00:31:57 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 floor — and what happens when, after years of calling that freedom, you find yourself at midnight rebuilding a lunch counter from your childhood just to feel the relief of knowing what the job is. We're going back to a dead pharmacy in Freeport, Illinois. We're talking about ambiguity, clarity, and the thing nobody tells you about creative independence — that freedom without a floor is just a different word for a cliff. And why sometimes the most creative thing you can do is make something small, completable, and finished. Even if nobody ever sees it. This episode is for the photographers, writers, designers, and creative humans in the long middle — still building, still surviving, still showing up. In this episode: Emmert Drugs — a pharmacy lunch counter in Freeport, Illinois that treated time like a suggestion. The specific relief of a task with edges. Why ambiguity has a metabolic cost. The Karasek demand-control model and why high demands plus low control is the actual engine of exhaustion — not hard work. What small floors are and why your nervous system needs them. If you're interested, you can see the spec Emmert Diner Spec Project I designed in 24 hours. Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. 🌐 terriblephotographer.com | |||
| The Mask - The Hidden Cost of Performing Expertise You Actually Have | 24 Feb 2026 | 00:54:10 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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—but the original one. The one that got built long before the first invoice. Carl Jung called it persona inflation: the moment the mask stops being a tool and starts being an identity. When the professional version of you becomes the only version that gets any airtime. I talk about what that looks like in practice—through the story of a photographer I know who froze when someone handed her a disposable camera at a block party, and through my own experience of a gear-shift I didn't choose at an IKEA on a rainy Tuesday night. My daughter noticed something on the drive home. She said: "You still make jokes, but you aren't you." I'm still sitting with that. This episode doesn't resolve cleanly. There's no five-step framework for finding your authentic self. What there is: a half-second of space between the mask going on and the automatic accommodation beginning. That pause is what this episode is about. In This Episode: — The etymology of persona: why the Romans built masks to amplify, not to hide — Quintus Roscius Gallus, the most celebrated actor in ancient Rome, and what happened to him when the performances stopped — Why "just be yourself" is the most useless advice in creative work—and what makes it so hard to push back on — How I learned to read a room, starting in Freeport, Illinois, and why I still can't turn it off — Carl Jung's concept of persona inflation—and how it shows up in photographers, designers, and anyone who's built a professional identity on top of a creative one — The IKEA moment: what a gear-shift feels like when you're not the one choosing it — The difference between the professional creative mask and the social one—and why they're the same animal — What Mara's disposable camera can tell us about the cost of twelve years inside a professional cage Referenced in This Episode: How to Win Friends and Influence People — Dale Carnegie Carl Jung — Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (on the concept of the Persona) Quintus Roscius Gallus — referenced in Cicero's letters and Julius Caesar's recorded commentary Connect: Email Patrick: patrick@terriblephotographer.com Website: http://terriblephotographer.com The Book — Lessons From a Terrible Photographer: https://www.terriblephotographer.com/the-book Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter): https://the-terrible-photographer.kit.com/223fe471fb Support the show: https://www.terriblephotographer.com/support Patrick on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/patrickfore/ The Terrible Photographer on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terriblephotographer/ Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore Music licensed through Epidemic Sound & Blue Dot SessionsEpisode photography from Adobe Stock & Unsplash Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California | |||
| Heresies - The Hyde - How Photography Is Used for Sexual Exploitation | 17 Feb 2026 | 01:03:39 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 down the shields and taking a long, hard look in the mirror. We’re talking about Power. Specifically, the unique, intoxicating power we hold the moment we pick up a camera. We explore how the "Artist" label is used as a bulletproof vest for manipulation, how the camera provides a "loophole" for the shadow, and why "consent" under a power imbalance isn't as clean as we’d like to believe. This isn't just about "those predators" in the headlines. It’s about the Hyde in all of us. If you don't think you have a shadow, you're the one most likely to let him hold the camera. What We Cover
Referenced in This Episode Historical Context:
Audio & Media:
Links & Resources The Terrible Photographer Website: terriblephotographer.com Instagram: @terriblephotographer Support the Show (Buy Me a Coffee) terriblephotographer.com/support Subscribe to Pub Notes (The Newsletter) the-terrible-photographer.kit.com Patrick Fore Instagram: @patrickfore Get in Touch If this episode made you feel something—rage, defensive, or relieved—I want to hear it. I read and respond to everything. patrick@terriblephotographer.com Credits Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound & Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California. Stay curious. Stay courageous. Stay terrible. | |||
| Heresies - The Corpse - How Instagram Trained Photographers to Be Perfect, Then Called It Boring | 10 Feb 2026 | 00:55:01 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 images functionally invisible. And on December 31st, 2025, Adam Mosseri—Instagram's head—posted an essay saying that professional photography is "cheap to produce and boring to consume." That camera companies are "betting on the wrong aesthetic." That savvy creators need to make "explicitly unproduced and unflattering" images to prove they're human. We spent a decade mastering the Instagram aesthetic—sharp, well-lit, technically perfect. And Instagram just told us that aesthetic is wrong. This episode is about what Instagram took from photographers. Not just reach or engagement, but livelihoods. Wedding photographers, family shooters, local portrait specialists—thousands of professionals built their entire client pipelines on Instagram. And Instagram was always a time bomb. Tomorrow was never promised. But when tomorrow was working, it was easy to forget that. This is the third heresy in the series. We've talked about camera companies that profit from inadequacy, and gear influencers who monetize it. This one's about the platform that promised to connect us—and ended up destroying the very thing it was built for.
The Origin Story The Shift Was It Ever Good? The Mosseri Revelation The Economic Trap The Scattering The Bellingham Confession What We Lost (And Should Be Glad to Lose) The Autopsy The Mirror The Ending
"We edited our souls in real-time to match the preferences of a faceless audience we couldn't see and didn't know." "You weren't shooting for your portfolio. You were shooting to pay rent to the platform." "Tomorrow was never promised. But when tomorrow was working, it was easy to forget that." "Instagram didn't kill photography by pivoting to video. Instagram was killing photography the whole time. We just didn't notice because we were too busy getting likes." "If Instagram disappeared tomorrow, would you still be a photographer? Not 'would you have a way to show your work' but 'would you still MAKE work?'" "That's not a portfolio. That's a content treadmill. That's sharecropping." "Instagram turned photography into a commodity of 1.2 seconds." "If your only reason to shoot was Instagram, you were building on quicksand." "They can't leave. Because leaving means clients stop finding them. But they can't stay on the old terms either. Because the old terms don't work anymore." "The platform is dying. Maybe that means photography can live again."
Adam Mosseri - "Authenticity after abundance" (Threads, December 31, 2025) Key quotes from Mosseri's post:
| |||
| Heresies - The Oracle - Why Photography Influencers Are Modern Televangelists | 03 Feb 2026 | 01:06:59 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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. This isn't about hating content creators. It's about understanding the incentive structures that teach us to worship what we lack instead of what we hold. And it's about recognizing our own complicity in building this machine. Warning: This episode names names and makes uncomfortable arguments. If you've ever upgraded your camera when you didn't need to, this one's going to hit close to home. IN THIS EPISODE The Peter Popoff Parallel The Gospel of the Spec Sheet The Liturgy of Inadequacy "Almost" Is the Most Profitable Emotion The Confession The Influencer-as-Career Problem The Mirror Moment Redefining "Good" The TikTok Critique The Scott Kelby / Jeremy Cowart Story What Actually Gets Lost The Portfolio Problem (The nuclear option) What Doesn't Matter (And What Does) The Ending KEY QUOTES "Almost is the most profitable emotion in the world. Because almost lets us feel like photographers without the risk of making photography." "Your satisfaction is their bankruptcy." "The camera didn't change. Your faith did. You were taught to worship what you lack instead of what you hold." "Transformation is not a transaction. It's something you build." "We've given authority to people who know how to measure corner sharpness but can't make an interesting photograph." "Certainty is the enemy of vision. Because vision lives in the uncertainty." "The thing I'm looking for isn't in the next camera. It's in the next thousand frames. And you can't buy those. You have to make them."
Peter Popoff Inside Edition Investigation (2015) James Randi Exposure Peter McKinnon Scott Kelby / Jeremy Cowart Photo Walk Ofcom (UK Broadcasting Regulator)
(For the "what to study instead" section)
AUDIO CLIPS USED Peter Popoff "Miracle Spring Water" Infomercial (2018) | |||
| Heresies - The Cult Member - Why Your Camera Brand Doesn't Care If You're a Good Photographer | 27 Jan 2026 | 00:47:58 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 departments. And what happens when you mistake ownership for mastery. We'll talk about the spreadsheet behind "partnerships." The ROAS calculations that determine who gets loaned gear. And why musicians like Benny Blanco make billion-stream hits on outdated Macs with wired keyboards while photographers argue about megapixels in forums. This isn't another "gear doesn't matter" sermon. Gear absolutely matters—but only if you already know what you're doing. The R5 makes you more capable, not better. And there's a difference. If you've ever felt like you needed the "right" camera to be taken seriously, this one's for you.
Quotable Moments "When everyone is a photographer, then no one is an artist." — 1890s photography critic "Ownership feels like mastery. That if you just have the right tool, the hard parts quietly disappear." "I wanted the gate to exist. I wanted the years to mean something visible. I wanted effort to leave a mark you could recognize on sight." "You're not a partner. You're a line item. An asset on a balance sheet. A tactic in a marketing plan." "The R5 doesn't make me a better photographer. It makes me a more capable photographer—but only if I already know what I'm doing." "The tool enables. But it doesn't create. Vision creates. Mastery creates. And you can't buy either of those." "Musicians fetishize sound. Photographers fetishize newness." "Pride is expensive. You can put pride in your work. Or you can put pride in your kit. One costs time. The other costs money." "If the most interesting thing about your work is what you shot it on, you didn't make work. You made a purchase."
Benny Blanco - Mix with the Masters Historical Context:
Musicians Referenced:
Gear Theory:
Links & Resources The Terrible Photographer Lessons From A Terrible Photographer (The Book) Support the Show (Buy Me a Coffee) Subscribe to Pub Notes (The Newsletter) Patrick Fore
Have a question? A story? Hate mail?
Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California Stay curious. Stay courageous. Stay terrible. | |||
| Basics, Deconstructed - Editing is Violence - How to Choose What Matters When Everything Looks Good | 22 Jan 2026 | 00:24:51 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 and having no idea which one cuts through. And about what happened when I finally admitted I was too close to see. This isn't about workflow. It's about authorship. Topics:
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Walter Murch – Film editor (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, The Conversation) LINKS & RESOURCES Website: http://terriblephotographer.com Lessons From A Terrible Photographer (The Book): https://www.terriblephotographer.com/the-book Support the show, buy me a coffee: https://www.terriblephotographer.com/support Subscribe to Pub Notes (The Newsletter): https://the-terrible-photographer.kit.com/223fe471fb Terrible Photographer on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terriblephotographer/ Patrick Fore on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/patrickfore/ CREDITS Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore Music licensed through Epidemic Sound & Blue Dot Sessions Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California CONTACT Questions? Thoughts? Hate mail? Stay curious. | |||
| Heresies - The Proxy - Why Listening to Your Clients Might Be A Bad Idea | 20 Jan 2026 | 00:49:08 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 about threading the needle between "authentic" and "amateur." About knowing when you're hired as an artist versus a technician. And about the clients who want you to recreate their blurry iPhone photos of tennis racquets at impossible angles. (Yes, that's a real story. No, I don't want to talk about it.) This isn't about ignoring your clients. It's about knowing when to translate what they're asking for into what they actually need.
Quotable Moments "You're not an equipment rental with legs." "Clients don't hire us to give them what they want. They hire us to give them something beautiful. Something effective." "If you don't have a vision, you can't translate someone else's vision." "You're not a photographer. You're just someone with a camera, waiting for instructions." "The cost of saying yes to the wrong client isn't just time and money. It's the slow, quiet erosion of why you started doing this in the first place."
Links & Resources The Terrible Photographer Lessons From A Terrible Photographer (The Book) Support the Show (Buy Me a Coffee) Subscribe to Pub Notes (The Newsletter) Patrick Fore
Have a question? A story? Hate mail?
Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore Stay curious. Stay courageous. Stay terrible. | |||
| Amature - Why I Envy Photographers Who Don't Get Paid | 13 Jan 2026 | 00:40:45 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 amateur photographers. Not because they're bad at what they do. Because they still have the thing I traded away. This is about the cost of professionalization. About the difference between making work because you have to versus making work because the work demands to be made. About freedom, money, and what happens when you refuse to let the transaction define the craft. If you've ever felt like you're not a "real" photographer because you don't charge... this one's for you. And if you're a pro who's forgotten why you started... this one's for you too. Key Themes:
Episode Timestamps: 0:00 - Cold Open: The Noodle Queen of Bangkok Mentioned in This Episode:
Key Quote: "You are not beneath professionals. You are adjacent to freedom they lost." For Jason: Thank you for the email. Thank you for the voicemail. Thank you for calling me out. This episode wouldn't exist without you. LINKS & RESOURCES: The Terrible Photographer: Lessons From A Terrible Photographer (The Book): Support The Show: Connect: CREDITS: Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore A NOTE FOR NON-PROFESSIONALS (Amatures): If you're listening to this and you don't charge for your work—if you shoot because you love it, not because you're building a business—please know this: Your work matters. You're not less than. You're not waiting to become real. You're already real. And some of us wish we still had what you have. SHARE THIS EPISODE: Know someone who needs to hear this? A parent with a camera. A hobbyist who doubts themselves. A pro who's forgotten why they started. Send them this episode. Let them know they're not alone. | |||
| The Fresh Start Fallacy - Are You Building a Boat or Just Floating in a Tube? | 06 Jan 2026 | 00:41:04 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 being the first one to try to get out, even when you don't know how to swim. I talk about my MIT PhD brother who doesn't know how to freelance. A wedding photographer who realized he became his father. And why I'm angry at ancestors I've never met for never trying to break a pattern I now have to fight. If you've ever felt like you're working hard but never building anything. Like you're trapped between staying comfortable and risking everything. Like you're the first person in your family trying to do something different with no map and no model—this one's for you. Not because I have answers. Because I'm in the middle of the same fight. IN THIS EPISODE:
WANT A SEAT AT THE TABLE? The Table is a small, email-based conversation space for creative people in the long middle. No apps. No feeds. No pressure. No posting requirements. Just occasional emails about the real stuff—and the option to reply, or not. Some weeks you'll get a reflection. Some weeks a question. Some weeks nothing. Sometimes it's about creative existential dread. Sometimes it's about whether gaffer tape smells different depending on the brand. It's a pub table. But everyone's wearing sweatpants. And nobody has to drive home. If you want a seat, email: patrick@terriblephotographer.com
Website: http://terriblephotographer.com The Newsletter: Sign up for Pub Notes – Musings, updates, and things I probably shouldn't say in public. Support the Show: Help keep the lights on Email the Host: patrick@terriblephotographer.com | |||
| The Long Middle - The Third Space - How to Actually Build Community When Traditional Third Spaces Are Dead (And Why We Have to Try Anyway) | 30 Dec 2025 | 00:38:42 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 people while remaining incomplete for others. This episode is both diagnosis and prescription: why we're lonely, why it's gotten worse, and the uncomfortable truth that you can't find community—you have to build it. One vulnerable conversation at a time. IN THIS EPISODE:
THE CHALLENGE: Reach out to ONE person this week. Not to network, not to collaborate. Just: "I've been thinking about creative loneliness lately. Want to grab coffee?" Then show up without your costume and talk about what you're actually struggling with. KEY QUOTES: "Third Space doesn't exist until someone creates it. And it doesn't start with a community. It starts with one person." "Digital-only Third Space is incomplete. You need to look someone in the eye. You need to sit across a table from another human. You need to exist in a room where you can't edit yourself before you speak." "You can't outsource belonging. You can't scroll your way to community. You can't consume your way to connection." "COVID didn't pause Third Space culture. It killed it. And we're still living in the wreckage." WANT A SEAT AT THE TABLE? The Table is a small, email-based conversation space for creative people in the long middle. No apps. No feeds. No pressure. No posting requirements. Just occasional emails about the real stuff—and the option to reply, or not. Some weeks you'll get a reflection. Some weeks a question. Some weeks nothing. Sometimes it's about creative existential dread. Sometimes it's about whether gaffer tape smells different depending on the brand. It's a pub table. But everyone's wearing sweatpants. And nobody has to drive home. If you want a seat, email: patrick@terriblephotographer.com LINKS: Website: terriblephotographer.com The Newsletter: Sign up for Pub Notes – Musings, updates, and things I probably shouldn't say in public. Support the Show: Help keep the lights on Email the Host: patrick@terriblephotographer.com
| |||
| The Long Middle - Part 3 - The Enemy - How Gatekeeping and Hierarchy Keep Creative Professionals Isolated (And Why We're All Complicit) | 23 Dec 2025 | 00:38:43 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 on other photographers while feeling looked down upon himself, this episode pulls no punches about how gatekeeping actually works, who it serves, and why we keep it alive. IN THIS EPISODE:
THE CHALLENGE: The next time someone asks "What are you working on?"—tell them the truth. Not the impressive version. Not the potential job. The actual work you're doing right now. Say it like it's legitimate work. Because it is. KEY QUOTE: "The hierarchy doesn't survive because the people at the top enforce it. It survives because the people in the middle enforce it. Because we're so afraid of being dismissed, we dismiss someone else first." LINKS: Website: terriblephotographer.com The Newsletter: Sign up for Pub Notes – Musings, updates, and things I probably shouldn't say in public. Support the Show: Help keep the lights on Email the Host: patrick@terriblephotographer.com CREDITS • Music: Licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions • Written and Produced by: Patrick Fore • Episode Image: Licensed through Adobe Stock | |||
| Basics, Deconstructed - Framing - Deconstructing Christopher Anderson’s Vanity Fair Portraits: What Every Photographer Needs to Know About Framing Power. | 17 Dec 2025 | 00:27:23 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 world look beige. In this episode, we discuss:
ABOUT CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON Christopher Anderson is a member of Magnum Photos and is widely considered one of the most influential photographers of his generation. He first gained international recognition for his work documenting the Haitian refugee crisis, where the boat he was traveling on sank in the Caribbean—work that earned him the Robert Capa Gold Medal. Whether he is documenting conflict, the streets of Shenzhen, or the corridors of power in D.C., Anderson’s work is defined by an intense, emotional intimacy and a refusal to provide a "clean" or "commercial" version of reality. Find his work here:
LINKS
CREDITS
| |||
| The Long Middle - Part 2 - The Costume - Why We Hide Behind Professional Roles | 16 Dec 2025 | 00:35:37 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 feel legitimate, and the five-second decision that keeps us from connection. IN THIS EPISODE:
THE CHALLENGE: The next time someone asks "How's it going?"—tell them one true thing. Not "busy." Not "crushing it." One honest thing. Drop the shield for ten seconds. LINKS: Website: terriblephotographer.com The Newsletter: Sign up for Pub Notes – Musings, updates, and things I probably shouldn't say in public. Support the Show: Help keep the lights on Email Patrick: patrick@terriblephotographer.com CREDITS: Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Episode Artwork Photo by @erwimadethis Written and Produced by Patrick Fore NEXT WEEK: Part 3 – "The Enemy" | |||
| The Long Middle - Part 1 - The Island - Why Mastery Is Lonely | 09 Dec 2025 | 00:34:23 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 expertise. The isolation that happens when you get really good at something and realize fewer and fewer people can see what you're actually doing. You're not broken. You're not ungrateful. You're not alone. You're just operating at a level where most people can't witness the craft.
The Joshua Bell Experiment Sarah's Email The Loneliness of Mastery Three Types of Loneliness
The Taylor Guitars Story Gratitude as a Weapon The Research Witnessed vs. Consumed Rivers vs. Pools
WHAT'S NEXT This is Part 1 of a 4-part series called "The Long Middle." Over the next three weeks, we'll explore:
If you're Joshua Bell in the subway right now—if you're doing your best work and feeling completely invisible—email me. Tell me about the work nobody sees.
Lessons From A Terrible Photographer is now available as a Limited Collector's Box ($69.99). Includes:
Standard hardback coming January 2026. Get yours: terriblephotographer.com
Email: podcast@terriblephotographer.com Website: terriblephotographer.com Instagram: @terriblephotographer
Music in this episode from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Episode photography provided by Benjamin Behre / Unsplash Written, Recorded, Produced & Edited by me, Patrick Fore.
Episode: 40
#CreativeLoneliness #PhotographyPodcast #CreativeEntrepreneur #MasteryAndIsolation #CreativeCommunity #TheTerriblePhotographer #JoshuaBell #WitnessedNotConsumed #ExpertiseIsolation #CommercialPhotography #CreativeLife #LongMiddle #ThePool
If this episode resonated with you, the best way to support the show is to:
This show exists because you listen. Thank you for being here. © 202... | |||
| The Curator's Disease - The Cost of Turning Your Life Into Content | 02 Dec 2025 | 00:47:16 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 ad agencies to our Saturday mornings, how we reverse-engineer our lives to fit a "Lululemon" aesthetic, and the exhausted reality of treating your family like supporting cast members. We discuss the difference between capturing a beautiful moment and interrupting a life to manufacture one. It’s time to get out of the Director’s Chair. In this episode:
Connect with The Terrible Photographer:
Credits:
| |||
| Noise in the Shadows - When the Enemy is Competence | 25 Nov 2025 | 00:29:56 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours 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 to "art directing" his own daughter's childhood—prioritizing perfect light over real memories—and asks if it's possible to trade competence back for presence. In this episode, we talk about:
Support the Show: If you enjoy these ramblings, or if this episode made you feel slightly less guilty about your grainy photos, consider fueling the next one. You can buy me a coffee (or let's be honest, a beer) to help keep the mics on and the existential spirals coming.
Links & Resources:
Credits:
| |||
| Basics, Deconstructed - Good vs. Bad - If It Feels Safe, It's Dead | 20 Nov 2025 | 00:28:50 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours In 1863, the Paris Salon rejected Édouard Manet's The Luncheon on the Grass for being too messy, too flat, too "unfinished." Today, it's one of the most important paintings in art history. Meanwhile, the "perfect" paintings that won the medals? Nobody remembers them. In this episode, we're deconstructing the biggest question photographers face: What makes a photo "good"? How do we measure it? Who decides? And why do we keep building portfolios that are technically perfect but emotionally dead? This is the first episode in a new mid-week series called "Basics, Deconstructed" we take the elementary concepts of photography and tear them down until we find the bone. In This Episode:
Key Quote: "I don't hire photographers to be commercial. I hire technicians to be sharp. I hire photographers to make me feel something." Contact & Support: 📧 Email: patrick@terriblephotographer.com 🎵 Music: epidemicsound.com ☕ Support the show: https://www.terriblephotographer.com/support 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terriblephotographer 📬 Newsletter (Pub Notes): https://the-terrible-photographer.kit.com/223fe471fb | |||
| Still Terrible - A Confession About Fear, Failure, and the Middle of the Story | 18 Nov 2025 | 00:56:12 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours In this episode, I talk about the question that has been following me around like a stray dog with abandonment issues: “What am I doing wrong?” A late-night Zoom call. A missed phone call that might have cost me a job. Fabric mocking me at 2 AM. Postponing Christmas. Pretending patience is a virtue when really it’s just a financial liability. This one is not a framework or a lesson. It is a confession. A pressure valve. A look at the part of the creative journey nobody posts about because it is messy and embarrassing and makes you question whether you even belong in the room. We get into:
If you have ever wondered whether you are behind, off-track, or quietly failing your way through your creative life, this episode is for you. Music Provided by: https://www.epidemicsound.com Support the Show If the podcast means something to you, or if it helps you feel a little less alone in this creative circus, you can support the show here: https://www.terriblephotographer.com/support Your support keeps the lights on, the episodes coming, and the midnight fabric-styling breakdowns to a minimum. Thank you for being part of this. | |||
| Bloody Knuckles - Let’s talk about A.I. | 10 Nov 2025 | 00:48:19 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours This is the episode I’ve been avoiding. Not because I don’t have an opinion about AI — but because I have too many feelings about it. Gratitude. Fear. Anger. Wonder. All tangled together. AI has become my external brain — a tool that helps me function, organize, even parent. And at the same time, it’s the thing that might end my career. In this episode, I talk honestly about what Adobe’s new AI tools mean for photographers, artists, and the humans behind the craft. About the moment when “photo editing” turns into “people editing.” And about what we lose when images no longer require someone to be there — to see, to choose, to feel. Because when everything becomes generated, the rarest thing left might just be the real. This isn’t a tech breakdown. It’s a gut check. In This Episode:
Featured Voices: A few members of The Terrible Community share how AI makes them feel — not what they think about it. “AI is lazy… it’s not intelligent, it’s just reflecting us — all our bias, all our noise — and pretending it’s something new.”Light Leak: Go make something where the practice is the point. Shoot something you’ll never post. Feel the weight of the camera in your hand — that’s what real still feels like. Because that’s the thing they can’t generate. That’s the thing they can’t take from you. Listen If You’ve Ever Thought:
Credits: Written & Narrated by: Patrick Fore Produced by: The Terrible Photographer Community Voicemails: Members of The Terrible List Music & Sound Design: Blue Dot Sessions Connect:
| |||
| Economic Dumpster Fire - Why the Creative Economy Split in Half (and How to Navigate It) | 04 Nov 2025 | 01:05:13 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours Episode 34 | November 2025 I was in my garage last Tuesday, shooting beef tallow. Yes, beef tallow—jarred cow fat with a marketing department. And while I'm adjusting highlights on solidified animal fat for the fourth time, I'm thinking: I used to shoot for Rolling Stone. What happened? Then my friend Candice texted. An illustrator in St. Louis. I asked how business was going. "Everything is a garbage fire out there." And that's when I realized: we're both drowning. But for completely opposite reasons. She doesn't have enough work. I have plenty of work—just the wrong work. And neither of us could shake the feeling that something bigger was happening. So I dug into the data. Economic reports, central bank surveys, and consumer debt studies. And what I found explains why so many freelancers feel like they're either sprinting or sinking right now. The economy didn't just slow down. It split in half.
The Three-Restaurant Economy
The Economic Data (Made Human)
What to Actually Do Tomorrow
Why Craft Still Matters
Timestamps: 00:00 - Cold Open: Beef Tallow in My Garage
Resources Mentioned: Economic Data Sources:
Strategic Frameworks:
What's Next: If this episode resonated with you, text a fellow creative and ask them: "How are you? Really?" Because the loneliest part of this moment isn't the struggle—it's the belief that you're the only one struggling. And if you want to talk more about navigating the bifurcated creative economy, hit me up on Instagram @patrickfore or email me at patrick@terriblephotographer.com The garbage fire is real. But so are we.
This is a show for creative humans navigating the messy reality of making work that matters while also paying rent. We talk about identity, craft, failure, and the absurdity of the creative industry—with radical honesty and zero bullshit. If you're tired of toxic positivity and gear reviews, you're in the right place. More Episodes: http://terriblephotographer.com
Hosted, Written, and Produced by: Patrick Fore Support the show: If this episode helped you, the best thing you can do is share it with another creative who needs to hear it. Word of mouth keeps this show alive. | |||
| Yeah, Maybe - Why Some People Kill Your Ideas (And How to Protect Them) | 28 Oct 2025 | 00:54:45 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours Have you ever shared something you were excited about only to have it met with "yeah, maybe" or "how are you going to monetize that?" In this episode, I sit down with a story that's been eating at me for weeks — a conversation at a coffee shop that revealed something uncomfortable about regret, haunted creatives, and the ghosts of unmade work. This isn't about toxic positivity or hustle culture. It's about understanding the difference between someone who's tired and someone who's haunted. Between love and regret. Between the people who will protect your ideas and the ones who will kill them — often without realizing it. And if I'm honest, it's about recognizing when we become those people ourselves.
The Coffee Shop Moment A conversation with a photographer friend that starts with excitement and ends with something closer to mourning. The Difference Between Tired and Haunted Why some people poke holes in your ideas — and it has nothing to do with you. Three Faces of Haunting
The Idea Graveyard My own confession: the photo essay about my hometown that will never exist, and what it taught me about shelf life. Love vs. Regret How my wife Jaimi saved me from launching a business I didn't actually want — and how to tell the difference between questions that protect you and questions that undermine you. The Physics of Regret How other people's ghosts create friction that converts your creative momentum into heat, defensiveness, and eventual paralysis. Protecting Your Butterflies Practical strategies for guarding your ideas and building a "Go" list instead of a "Know" list.
"He wasn't trying to kill my idea. He was mourning his own." "When your idea gets that big, that expensive, that unreachable — it becomes a shield. The dream has become the cage." "Ideas have a shelf life. They start fresh, urgent, necessary. Leave them too long, they spoil." "Haunted people ask questions to protect themselves. People who love you ask questions to protect you." "Friction converts kinetic energy into heat. Your momentum gets converted into defensiveness. Your creative energy burns off as anxiety." "The only thing worse than starting something and failing... is not starting something at all." — Seth Godin "You can't hitch your momentum to parked cars."
Make two lists: List One: The Haunted People who respond to your excitement with skepticism, apathy, or "yeah, maybe." They don't get access to your butterflies. List Two: The Builders The ones who finish, ship, say "fuck yes," and offer help instead of obstacles. These are your people. Stop pitching to List One. Guard your butterflies. Feed them only to people who still believe they're real. Concepts Explored:
Quote: "The only thing worse than starting something and failing... is not starting something at all." — Seth Godin
Website: patrickfore.com Instagram: @patrickfore Podcast: The Terrible Photographer Book: Lessons From a Terrible Photographer (coming soon)
Host & Producer: Patrick Fore Episode Photography: Amy Humphries Find Amy on Instagram: @amyjoyhumphries Music Licensed Through:
Support The Show If this episode resonated with you, here's how you can help:
A Note From Patrick This episode has been living in my head for weeks. The coffee shop conversation happened months ago, but it took me this long to understand what it was really about. I hope this gives you permission to protect your ideas. To say "fuck yes" to butterflies when they land on your shoulder. And to stop asking permission from people who stopped saying yes a long time ago. Thanks for being here. Until next Tuesday — stay curious, stay courageous, and yeah, stay terrible. — Patrick The Terrible Photographer is a podcast for creative humans navigating the messy reality of making work that matters. We don't do hustle culture. We don't do toxic positivity. We do honest conversations about creativity, identity, and finding your voice. | |||
| Gold Star - Why Artists Keep Chasing Validation and How to Find Meaning Without the Awards | 21 Oct 2025 | 00:55:48 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours You ever buy a twenty-two-dollar airport sandwich and convinced yourself it was worth it? That’s what this week’s episode is about — except the sandwich is a photography competition. In Gold Star, Patrick unpacks his love-hate relationship with the American Photographic Artists’ Untitled competition — and what it reveals about the creative world’s obsession with approval. From spreadsheets of judges to award-show absurdities like the Oscars and Grammys, this episode digs into why artists still crave validation from systems they don’t even believe in. It’s funny, frustrated, and a little too honest — a meditation on why we keep chasing the gold stars that will never love us back. Featuring a clip from Jim Carrey’s Golden Globes speech, a story about Patrick’s first Houston Addy Award, and a Light Leak that challenges you to make something that doesn’t need anyone’s permission to exist. You’ll hear about:
Mentioned in this episode:
Light Leak: The Paradox of the Work What if you stopped making work for judges, algorithms, and invisible audiences — and started making the thing that’s too honest to explain? | |||
| The Cage - Three Invisible Prisons That Keep Creatives Small | 14 Oct 2025 | 01:09:32 | |
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 https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours Why creatives stay stuck, even when the door’s wide open. We all want freedom. Creative freedom, emotional freedom, professional freedom. But here’s the thing nobody tells you: You can be free… and still live like you’re caged. In this episode, I break down the three invisible cages every creative person ends up pacing:
It starts with a pacing lioness in San Diego, makes a detour through childhood Masonic mystery, and ends in a gallery in LA with a man named Jesse and a story I still can’t shake. If you’ve ever felt trapped by your own success, your style, your niche, or your silence… this one’s for you. Light Leak Assignment: Choose your cage. Take one honest step outside it. Before the week ends. No excuses. Listen if you’ve ever said:
Support the Show: This show is 100% listener-supported, which means I’m not selling presets, funnel hacks, or “ten ways to make six figures with your camera.” But if the episode made you feel something — if it helped you name the cage — I’d love your support. 👉 terriblephotographer.com/support Three amazing humans have already joined. Be the fourth. Let’s get weird and honest together. Episode Topics:
🔗 Other Mentions:
Stay curious. Stay courageous. And yeah… stay terrible. | |||