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

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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.

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 Stayed up too late, rebuilt half my website for an algorithm, and unpublished pages I'd spent months on.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

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.

In This Episode

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.

The Book

Lessons From a Terrible Photographer

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theterriblecreative.com/support

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Patrick Fore 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

There's a composite photographer in this episode named Nate. His details have been changed. His situation has not.

This episode is about the creator economy — what it actually costs, who it was actually built for, and the quiet compromise most creative professionals are making every day. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just quietly, in parking garages, watching the blue light of a phone, waiting for a signal that isn't coming.

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

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.

LINKS

• Website: terriblephotographer.com
• Support the show: terriblephotographer.com/support
• Subscribe to Pub Notes: the-terrible-photographer.kit.com
• Instagram: @terriblephotographer
• Patrick on Instagram: @patrickfore
• Email Patrick: patrick@terriblephotographer.com

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 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:

• Why Tom calls himself a phototherapist and what that actually means
• The difference between fashion and style in photography
• What bifurcation is doing to the industry right now
• Why the artists are still there, just quieter
• How Tom identifies what's already working in someone's portfolio
• The Polaroid workshops that started it all
• Why commodity photography has a shrinking runway
• What to do if you don't feel like you have anything interesting to say

Find Tom at bytomw.com and on Instagram at @bytomw. Consultations are free. Go get unstuck.

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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.

LINKS

• Website: terriblephotographer.com
• Support the show: terriblephotographer.com/support
• Subscribe to Pub Notes: the-terrible-photographer.kit.com
• Instagram: @terriblephotographer
• Patrick on Instagram: @patrickfore
• Email Patrick: patrick@terriblephotographer.com

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.

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

• Yale Budget Lab – March 2026 Report on Creative Automation.
• Immanuel Kant – The distinction between Instrumental and Intrinsic Value (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals).
• IDIBELL UB Brain Cognition Group – 2026 study in Advanced Science on human imaginative leaps.
• James Taylor – SuperCreativity and the concept of Centaurs vs. Cyborgs.

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.

LINKS

• Website: terriblephotographer.com
• Support the show: terriblephotographer.com/support
• Subscribe to Pub Notes: the-terrible-photographer.kit.com
• Instagram: @terriblephotographer
• Patrick on Instagram: @patrickfore
• Email Patrick: patrick@terriblephotographer.com

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.

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 Patrick : patrick@terriblephotographer.com

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.

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

WALL-E opening sequence

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.