The Terrible Creative

Dear Terrible Friends,
This episode is going to be a little different. I wanted to let you know that I'm going to be taking a little bit of a break for a bit. 
I’m actually about to leave (in a few days) for a three-week trip with my daughter. We’re going to bounce around the East Coast a little bit. Spending some time around the mountains of Virginia, then DC, then Philly, NYC, Boston then into the sticks of New England. By the way, if you’re in those areas, and want to grab coffee or a beer, let me know. I can try to make it work. I would love to meet some people.
But yeah, I’m going to take some pictures actually. I’m bringing my camera, with one 35mm lens and make some stuff and to document our trip obviously. And beyond that, I’m going to catch up on some reading. I’m going to think a lot. I’m probably going to write some things down that turn out to be completely stupid and irrelevant later.
And rather than frantically making a bunch of episodes before I leave so there’s something sitting in your podcast feed, I’m just… not going to do that.
But really though, I’m going to start figuring out what the next version of The Terrible Creative looks like.
I don’t know exactly what that is yet. And I actually think that’s a good thing.

I’m not announcing a new season. I’m not making some grand promise about what happens next. I don’t even know exactly when I’ll be back.  I just know that after 80 episodes, I want episode 81 to feel like we’re going somewhere.
But before I go, I really do want to say thank you.
There are some of you who have been listening to this weird little project since the beginning. That was April of 2025.
Some of you listen every week. You’ve sent me emails. You’ve shared episodes with people. You’ve bought the book. Some of you have even supported this show with your own hard-earned money.
And I don’t take any of that lightly.
The fact that I can make something like this, put it out into the world, and there are actual people on the other side who choose to spend part of their day listening to me is still kind of incredible to me.
So to everybody who has listened to any of these first 80 episodes, and especially those of you who have stuck around through all the different versions of this thing…

Thank you.
Follow me at the links below. Email me, DM me and check in. I would love to hear from you.
So until...I come back with Episode 81, I will see you later, whenever later is.
Patrick
The Book Lessons From a Terrible Photographer

The Terrible Creative on Instagram
Patrick Fore on Instagram
Email Me (Patrick Fore)

Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.

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Office Hours with Patrick

Stuck on your website, portfolio, pricing, marketing, or business strategy?
Office Hours is a one-on-one, 60-ish minute conversation to help you work through whatever you’re trying to figure out. No agenda. No curriculum. No pitch. Just honest feedback, thoughtful questions, and a fresh perspective.
$99
Learn more or book your session:
https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours

Episode 80 — Worth

Photographers love telling each other to “know your worth.”
Okay. What’s mine?
One client trusts you with a production worth tens of thousands of dollars. Another pays you a few hundred bucks and tells you that you didn’t do a very good job.
Same photographer. Same experience. Same eye.
In this episode, I’m trying to figure out what those numbers actually mean. We talk about day rates, lowball inquiries, why better photography isn’t always more valuable to the person buying it, and what happens when we take economic information from the market and turn it into a judgment about our work—or ourselves.
Because maybe the estimate tells us something useful about the business.
But I’m not sure our worth has any business being on it.

Featured clip: Moneyball — used in Act Three as we get into how markets assign value, what they measure, and what they sometimes miss.
Handshake music: Instrumental version of “Take On Me” — a small nod to entering the 80s.
Episode artwork: Photograph by César Rincón.
Resources
The Book Lessons From a Terrible Photographer
Support the Show terriblephotographer.com/support
Stay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)
The Terrible Creative on Instagram
Patrick Fore on Instagram
Email Me (Patrick Fore)

Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore.
Music licensed through Blue Dot Sessions. 
Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.

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

Stuck on your website, portfolio, pricing, marketing, or business strategy?
Office Hours is a one-on-one, 60-ish minute conversation to help you work through whatever you’re trying to figure out. No agenda. No curriculum. No pitch. Just honest feedback, thoughtful questions, and a fresh perspective.
$99
Learn more or book your session:
https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours

You can buy the camera. You can learn the lighting. You can spend years mastering the technical side of photography until the camera finally gets out of the way.
Then comes the harder question: What do you actually want to photograph?

In the final episode of Photography: Gear, Craft & Voice, I’m talking about what happens when technical competence is no longer the problem—and you’re left alone with your own ideas, or the uncomfortable lack of them.
We’ll talk about creative avoidance, why inspiration so easily turns into imitation, the strange difficulty of making work nobody asked for, and why your voice may have less to do with developing a “style” than paying attention to the things you can’t stop thinking about.
Because eventually, the question stops being whether you know how to make the photograph.
It becomes: What do you actually care about?
Resources
APA (Advertising Photographers of America) Find your local chapter at apanational.org
The Book Lessons From a Terrible Photographer
Support the Show terriblephotographer.com/support
Stay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)
The Terrible Creative on Instagram
Patrick Fore on Instagram
Email Me (Patrick Fore)

Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore.
Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. 
Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.

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

Stuck on your website, portfolio, pricing, marketing, or business strategy?
Office Hours is a one-on-one, 60-ish minute conversation to help you work through whatever you’re trying to figure out. No agenda. No curriculum. No pitch. Just honest feedback, thoughtful questions, and a fresh perspective.
$99
Learn more or book your session:
https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours

There is a quiet, infuriating moment every creator faces: looking at the LCD screen and realizing the image in front of you isn't even in the same conversation as the one living in your head.
In Part Two of our series on Gear, Craft & Voice, Patrick Fore breaks down what it actually takes to close the gap between imagination and execution. From late-night isolation sessions trying to light reflective acoustic guitars to nearly blowing a high-stakes commercial architecture shoot by blindly following an online tutorial, this episode explores the unglamorous reality of building instinct.
We look at why repetition without an audit is useless, how recipes differ from underlying principles, and the dangerous trap waiting for you at the top of technical execution.
Key Takeaways
The Comparison Ritual: How placing your raw work side-by-side with a target image strips away ego and isolates the only question that matters: "What's different?"
The Audit Over Mindless Reps: Putting in "ten thousand hours" doesn't teach you anything if you aren't changing one variable at a time and auditing the result.
Practice Without an Institutional Studio: You don't need five-figure gear or a commercial space to learn light. A kitchen mug, a single desk lamp, and a piece of foam board obey the exact same laws of physics.
Recipes vs. Principles: Recipes sell certainty by encoding someone else’s controlled environment. Principles give you the framework to solve unfamiliar problems under live client pressure.
The Dark Side of Craft: Technical capacity answers how, but it never touches why. Flawless execution can easily become a comfortable, expensive hiding place.
Resources
The Book Lessons From a Terrible Photographer
Support the Show terriblephotographer.com/support
Stay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)
The Terrible Creative on Instagram
Patrick Fore on Instagram
Email Me (Patrick Fore)

Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore.
Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. 
Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.

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

Stuck on your website, portfolio, pricing, marketing, or business strategy?
Office Hours is a one-on-one, 60-ish minute conversation to help you work through whatever you’re trying to figure out. No agenda. No curriculum. No pitch. Just honest feedback, thoughtful questions, and a fresh perspective.
$99
Learn more or book your session:
https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours

Photography: The Gear, The Craft &  The Voice — Part One
Every photographer inherits a definition of good before they've earned one. This episode is about where that definition actually comes from, why gear ends up being the evidence of it, and why the real question was never which camera to buy.
Patrick walks through camera store tribalism, the teachers nobody asks to have (YouTubers, algorithms, magazines, the guy at the counter), a British portrait photographer who rewired how he thought about images during a COVID-era Clubhouse call, a viral coffee photo he's since made peace with, and why he was wrong to blame Canon for any of it. First of a three-part series on gear, craft, and voice.
In this episode:
The quiet neurosis of buying a new camera, and the specific lie it tells you
Why brand loyalty (Canon vs. Sony vs. Fuji vs. Leica) is never really about the gear
The trend history nobody wants to own: shallow depth of field, HDR, orange and teal, drone reveals, LUTs, AI skin
Tom Hoops and the conversations that happened on Clubhouse during lockdown
A photo Patrick made that went semi-viral, and what he now understands about why
Why "gear doesn't matter" and "gear matters" are both the wrong question
What actually changed his relationship to his own cameras, four to five years in the making
Mentioned in this episode:
Tom Hoops, portrait photographer — tomhoops.com / @tomhoops on Instagram
Peter McKinnon — YouTube
Casey Neistat — YouTube
Jared Polin (FroKnowsPhoto) — YouTube
Resources
APA (Advertising Photographers of America) Find your local chapter at apanational.org
The Book Lessons From a Terrible Photographer
Support the Show terriblephotographer.com/support
Stay Connected Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)
The Terrible Creative on Instagram
Patrick Fore on Instagram
Email Me (Patrick Fore)

Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore.
Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. 
Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.

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

Stuck on your website, portfolio, pricing, marketing, or business strategy?
Office Hours is a one-on-one, 60-ish minute conversation to help you work through whatever you’re trying to figure out. No agenda. No curriculum. No pitch. Just honest feedback, thoughtful questions, and a fresh perspective.
$99
Learn more or book your session:
https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours