The Terrible Creative cover art

The Terrible Creative

The Terrible Creative

By: Patrick Fore
Listen for free

The Terrible Creative is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative professionals working through the parts of the creative process no gear review or business course ever covers. Each episode is 30 to 40 minutes. Solo. Story-driven. Built around mental health, artistic identity, and what honest work costs in a career rewarding performance over truth. This is not a photography podcast about cameras, presets, or client strategy. This is a podcast about the inner experience of being a creative professional, made for the mid-career photographer or designer who has mastered the technical side but lost the thread. Hosted by Patrick Fore, commercial photographer, author, and former lead photographer and brand designer for Taylor Guitars. His work has appeared globally for clients like Nike, Petco, and Verizon. He built this show because none of the podcasts he found addressed the real problem. If you are a photographer or creative professional who feels competent on the outside and quietly lost on the inside, you are a Terrible Creative. This is your podcast.2025 Patrick Fore Photography, LLC Art Social Sciences
Episodes
  • The Missing Map - How To Become A Commercial Photographer in 2026

    The Missing Map - How To Become A Commercial Photographer in 2026
    Jul 7 2026

    A friend of mine named Megan has spent more than a decade making beautiful, deeply human photographs of families. The kind of work that makes you feel something long after you’ve put the camera down. More than once I’ve told her she should be shooting commercial lifestyle campaigns.

    Every time I do, she smiles and says the same thing.

    “I couldn’t.”

    Not because she lacks talent.

    Because somewhere along the way, she decided that world belonged to someone else.

    That conversation sent me down a rabbit hole I wasn’t expecting. I started asking a deceptively simple question:

    How do you actually become a commercial photographer in 2026?

    The longer I looked for the answer, the stranger it became.

    This episode isn’t really about AI. AI simply exposed a much older problem. It’s about invisible career paths, inherited knowledge, and the possibility that commercial photography has spent decades telling origin stories without ever drawing a map.

    Maybe the next generation isn’t failing to find commercial photography.

    Maybe commercial photography is failing to find them.

    In This Episode

    • Why “How do I become a commercial photographer?” is much harder to answer than it should be.
    • Why photographers like Megan may already have the eye for commercial work without realizing it.
    • The surprising difference between a profession built on pathways and one built on folklore.
    • Why AI isn’t the story, it’s the stress test.
    • A challenge to every working commercial photographer: if we care about the future of this profession, maybe it’s time we start drawing the map.

    Resources

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

    The Book

    Lessons From a Terrible Photographer

    Support the Show

    terriblephotographer.com/support

    Stay Connected

    Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter)

    The Terrible Creative on Instagram

    Patrick Fore on Instagram

    Email Me (Patrick Fore)

    Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore.
    Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions.
    Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.
    Show More Show Less
    42 mins
  • Let's Talk Money (Again) - A Terrible Conversation with Shelly Waldman

    Let's Talk Money (Again) - A Terrible Conversation with Shelly Waldman
    Jun 30 2026
    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 WaldmanShelly 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.Portfolio: shellywaldman.comEducation & Resources: creativecamp.proKey Moments & Deep Dives1. Blue-Collar Anchors vs. Corporate ExpectationsPatrick 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 ControlWe 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 ExploitationPatrick 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 DesertShelly 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 TraumaWhen a creative professional is terrified to raise their rates, Shelly and Patrick deploy two completely different, equally necessary coaching frameworks:Shelly’s Data Method: Break down your cost of living into a hard, non-negotiable survival line. Then, increase your rates incrementally by fifty dollars on every single new inquiry until the market explicitly tells you "No." Run the 100 No Project and treat rejection like a game of Monopoly.Patrick’s Identity Method: Stop looking at the spreadsheet and look in the mirror. Identify the ghost inside your ego. Ask yourself if you are undercharging because your portfolio is weak, or because your family history has trained you to believe you don't deserve to hold capital.Surviving Another Day in 2026Patrick 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 ...
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 46 mins
  • Money Talks - Audiobook Preview: The psychology of undercharging and how financial stability creates true creative freedom.

    Money Talks - Audiobook Preview: The psychology of undercharging and how financial stability creates true creative freedom.
    Jun 23 2026

    We are doing something a little different this week. To give the live microphone a brief rest, we are pulling back the curtain on a project that has been built in the dark for months. In this episode, you are getting an exclusive, unedited listen to an entire chapter from my newly released audiobook: Chapter 14 — "Money Talks."
    This chapter cuts straight down to the bone of creative capitalism. It’s about the raw, visceral panic of quoting a number that makes your palms sweat, why the romanticized "starving artist" trope is an absolute lie, and how your pricing is a profound statement about your creative self-worth, not just a line item on an invoice.
    🎧 THE AUDIOBOOK IS OFFICIALLY OUT IN THE WILD
    The wait is over. The complete audiobook version of Lessons From a Terrible Photographer is officially live and streaming onsite at Audible, Apple Books, and everywhere else you consume audio.
    If you want to grab your copy, listen to the rest of the book, or check out what people are saying, head directly to the link below:
    👉 Get the Audiobook Here: theterriblecreative.com/the-book
    In This Chapter:

    • The Starbucks Recalibration: The story of the first time I quoted a five-figure rate ($32,000) that made my hands sweat in Irvine, California—and the epiphany that followed.
    • The Trust Fund Myth: Why the "starving artist" romance loses its appeal the exact second your electricity gets turned off, and who actually invented that narrative.
    • The $500 Downtown LA Disaster: A painful look back at my early freelancing days on Upwork, lugging backgrounds up thirty flights of stairs, and realizing my business was just a very expensive hobby.
    • The Discount Photographer Death Spiral: The exact self-perpetuating psychological trap that keeps talented creatives broke, resentful, and suffocated.
    • The Intention Effect: How walking away from a corporate salary at Taylor Guitars forced my brain's Reticular Activating System to prioritize non-negotiable financial targets.
    • The Freedom Equation: Why financial stability isn't for "sellouts"—it is the literal foundation that gives you the breathing room to take true artistic risks.

    🪵 NEXT WEEK: Money Shame & Trauma with Shelly Waldman
    This audiobook drop is the exact intellectual foundation for where this show is heading next week. Next week, we are continuing our dive into the financial muck with a massive pod-swap conversation featuring Shelly Waldman from the Creative Campfire podcast.
    We are leaving the dry business strategies at the door and getting entirely real about money trauma, freelance precarity, and what happens when an empty inbox makes you feel like a failure as a human being.
    Go grab the audiobook, digest Chapter 14, and brace yourself for next week.
    Connect With the Show:

    • Audiobook Links: theterriblecreative.com/the-book
    • Main Website & Archive: theterriblecreative.com
    • Email is Always Open: Send your thoughts, questions, or unfiltered hate mail directly through the link in the show notes. I read everything.

    Stay curious. Stay courageous. Stay terrible.
    Show More Show Less
    43 mins
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet