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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.
Leadership, Manual Labor, and the Reality of the Long Middle.
If you only learned commercial photography from photographers on Instagram, you’d think the job mostly consists of mood boards, agency meetings, magazine-ready models, perfectly dressed crews, and somebody handing the photographer a coffee they somehow already know how you take.
And I want to say, that job exists.
It also isn’t where most careers happen.
Most commercial photography smells like cardboard boxes. Dust. Gaffer tape. White seamless paper. Dead batteries. A microfiber cloth that’s already dirtier than the product you’re trying to clean. It’s arguing with a tether cable that worked five minutes ago but now doesn’t see the god damned camera. It’s standing over a spreadsheet trying to remember whether SKU NP-417T is the one with the left-facing connector or the right-facing one.
Nobody puts that part on Instagram.
Nobody builds a personal brand around naming conventions.
Nobody posts the 20 minutes they spent trying to figure out why Capture One suddenly stopped talking to the camera.
But that’s where I think most careers actually live.
The unusual jobs make better stories.
The ordinary jobs pay the mortgage.
A longtime listener named Ben sent me an email a week or so ago. Ben’s in Scotland. He’s been listening to this show for a long time. I actually texted him a shoot I was doing and in the exchange, I asked if he has any episode ideas. Ben was on vacation, somewhere in Europe or whatever, He said he would get back to me. Then this past week he sent me an email with a bunch of ideas. All of his ideas were good, but two of the ideas stuck out immediately.
Here is what he said, as he wrote it:
Idea 1 - “Your conversation with Shelly touched on a lot of things that you haven't really so far, usage rights, pricing, business model. Is there any scope here for you going through the things you think everyone should be thinking about. Builds well on the 'What it takes to be a Commercial Photographer'. Give people a professional audit, but not in a 'sell your way to 6 figures' way, in a friendly, 'you need to think about this shit' kind of a way. The Audit covered a lot of creative stuff, this is the flip-side, or a continuation of that episode.
Idea 2 - “You talk regularly about the Californian market, and rightly so, it's your world. But I've never done a shoot where I've had a stylist, digitial tech, or even paid models that aren't mates of mine that I haven't 'hired in'. That's not to say I couldn't run a five figure shoot, but that's not where I'm aiming. At the moment, I'm not vying for that business and nor do I want to be. What I'm doing is going very well.”
The frist idea was good and I thought he wanted an episode about the business side. Usage rights. Licensing. Pricing. The part of commercial photography that everybody should understand but almost nobody really does. I’m not sure if I’m the best person for that episode. I’m probably not that smart or qualified. I can barely wrap my head around this shit sometimes.
But his second idea was interesting. Sent my mind going in a bunch of different directions.
Ben admitted that he had never hired a stylist. Never worked with a digital tech. Never hired a professional model who wasn’t a mate doing him a favor. He wasn’t asking how to run a million-dollar production.
I think when we combine both of his ideas into one, I think he was asking more about what competence actually looks like.
Not talent.
Not confidence.
Not your day rate.
Competence.
The kind that makes another human being comfortable handing you responsibility and a check with multiple zeros.
And the more I thought about it…
…the more I realized I’ve probably been accidentally lying to you.
Not with facts.
With proportions.
As Ben so honestly pointed out, I talk about California a lot on this show. The agency jobs. The productions with assistants and producers and somebody handing me coffee before I’ve even touched a camera.
Those jobs are real.
They’re also the exception.
And this is where I need to confess something. Ben, unknowingly, pointed to a facade maybe, an illusion that I was intentionally or unintentionally creating by self selecting stories and anecdotes for this podcast. Telling you about the fancy ones, the sexy ones, the expensive ones with a full crew and a producer who hands me the nitro cold brew.
But, and here is my confession, there are plenty of weeks, what’s actually happening is I’m loading my Subaru Forester Sport with my own C-stands before sunrise, pushing a cart of gear into some anonymous office park, and organizing my own files on my own Macbook Pro because there isn’t anybody else there to do it.
And, strangely enough…
I think that’s where this episode actually begins.
My name is Patrick Fore, and this is The Terrible Creative, honest conversations about creativity, identity, and the parts of this life nobody puts in the brochure.
This is Episode 75.
I'm calling it The Audit Part Two, The Soul of the C-Stand, or Leadership, Manual Labor, and the Reality of the Long Middle.
Today we're talking about competence. Not talent, not gear, not who's got the biggest crew. What it actually means to be trusted with a job, where that trust comes from, and why the photographer still willing to carry his own C-stand might understand this work better than the one who's forgotten how to.
If this is your first time here, welcome. I'm a commercial photographer based in San Diego, doing this full time for over a decade now, and photography's the language I use around here to think through everything underneath it, leadership, responsibility, ego, what it actually costs to build a life making things.
So whether you're a photographer or you make something else entirely, I hope you find something in this one.
Show notes for this episode are linked wherever you're listening. If you want to reach out, or check anything I mention today, that's where to find it.
Let's get into it.
Okay so, before we get into this one, if you haven't heard Episode 56, go back to it after this. It's called The Audit, and there's a reason this one's Part Two.
That episode started with a painter named Paul Delaroche, who strolled into a room in Paris in 1839, watched Louis Daguerre demonstrate the first photograph, and reportedly said, "From today, painting is dead." He probably never actually said it and if he did say it, I imagine him moderately drunk. Doesn't matter though, because I think it named something true, the specific terror of watching a machine do the thing you spent your life learning to do.
And I used that story to go after myself. I'd just sat in a room with the people smart people, leaders in this industry, came home, opened my own portfolio, and asked a harder question than "can AI replace me." I typed a description of one of my own "perfect" client images into an AI generator. It got about ninety percent of the way there in four minutes. That sent me looking for the actual difference between the images in my portfolio that had a pulse and the ones that didn't. I called a friend, Morgan, and ran him through the same audit, live, on tape. What I landed on wasn't comforting, but it was honest: the fear underneath every AI conversation in this industry isn't really about AI. It's recognition. A lot of us were making replaceable work before AI ever showed up, because we'd trained ourselves to shoot for the scroll instead of shooting for something true.
That episode was an audit of the work. This one's an audit of the person doing the work, what you can actually do, what you're willing to do, whether you've earned the trust you're asking people to put in you. Same word, different mirror. Go listen to 56 if you haven't. It'll make this one land harder.
—--
A couple of weeks ago I spent three and a half days in a room that couldn’t have been more than twelve feet by fifteen.
It was an e-commerce shoot for a small hardware company here in San Diego. Most of my commercial work pulls me north—Carlsbad, Irvine, Orange County, Los Angeles—but this one was close enough that I could drive home for lunch every day. I don’t think that’s ever happened before. Somehow that made it feel even more like punching a clock.
The room was just a basic room. White tiled floor, grey walls. A folding work table made by DeWalkt. 96 inch White seamless paper held up high by two c-stands. My Canon R5 tethered into Capture One (not a sponsor, but should be) by red Area 51 tether cables ( also not a sponsor, but should be). Cases stacked against the wall. Cardboard boxes piled in the next room, each one holding another product waiting its turn.
Every few minutes another box would appear on the table.
Open the box.
Check the SKU against the spreadsheet. Assign the capture folder in Capture One.
Wipe fingerprints off the product.
Four angles.
Rename the files.
Pack it back up.
Reach for the next one.
By the second day I started calling it Photo Jail.
Not because it was miserable.
Because it was wonderfully, almost comically, repetitive.
Same camera.
Same lens.
Same lighting.
Same framing.
The goal wasn’t to make every product look unique. The goal was to make Product 417 feel like it belonged in the same family as Product 12. If somebody scrolled through a hundred images on the client’s website, nothing should call attention to itself. Consistency was the entire assignment.
I have a strange relationship with that little Canon AC adapter.
I hate pulling it out because I know exactly what kind of week I’m about to have.
But I also kind of love it.
Because it usually means I’m about to get paid.
It’s this tiny piece of plastic and wire that lives in the bottom of one of my cases. Most photographers buy one thinking they’ll hardly ever use it. Mine practically has permanent residency. Jobs like this are exactly what it was built for. The camera isn’t leaving the tripod. The lights aren’t moving. Neither am I.
You know you’re in Photo Jail when your Canon R5 is plugged into the wall instead of running on batteries.
And honestly…
I have a lot of affection for jobs like this.
Nobody posts them on Instagram.
Nobody flies across the country to photograph a black anodized mounting bracket on white seamless.
There isn’t a creative director pacing behind you talking about emotional storytelling. Nobody’s debating whether the image feels “aspirational.” You’re not trying to make art.
You’re trying to make accurate, consistent photographs that help someone sell a product online.
It’s slower.
It’s quieter.
It’s less glamorous.
But it’s honest work.
Somewhere during the second afternoon, the repetition stopped feeling repetitive. The rhythm took over. The body stops asking whether it’s bored and starts looking for small improvements. The microfiber cloth finds a better home on the table. The spreadsheet gets organized a little cleaner. You stop reaching for things because they’re closest and start reaching for them because that’s where they belong.
There’s a satisfaction in that.
Not excitement.
Not inspiration.
Competence.
By the end of that third day, I thought I’d survived the heavy lifting. Three days on concrete, wiping down plastic, checking off spreadsheets in Photo Jail. The product work was wrapped. All that was left was day four—a little lifestyle imagery in the warehouse, packing up, and going home.
When you run a lean operation, you tend to forget that your own body is the entire infrastructure. If a laptop crashes, you reboot it. If a light blows, you swap it. But you just assume the human holding the camera will keep running on autopilot.
I was on the drive home after wrapping that third afternoon, sitting in stopped traffic on the on-ramp to Interstate 15, when I looked in my rearview mirror and realized the Honda behind me wasn’t slowing down.
There wasn’t really time to think. Just enough time to brace.
He hit me square in the rear bumper.
A witness later told me they never saw brake lights. The driver just… drove into me.
It wasn’t dramatic. No airbags. No spinning across the freeway. Just that dull, violent feeling of being completely stopped and suddenly finding yourself somewhere else.
We pulled off to the shoulder. Exchanged insurance information. Asked each other if we were okay—that strange little ritual that happens after every collision, where adrenaline politely lies to both people.
I drove home thinking I’d gotten lucky.
Then I woke up the next morning.
Everything between my shoulders and my hips had tightened up overnight.
Not enough to go to the hospital. Not enough to cancel the final day of production. Just enough that every ordinary movement suddenly required a negotiation.
Getting out of bed. Bending over. Reaching into the back of the Subaru.
Bending over.
Reaching into the back of the Subaru.
Standing in one place for more than a few minutes.
But the first thing I thought about wasn’t my back.
It was teardown.
I’ll let you in on a little secret.
My least favorite part of any shoot isn’t the early alarm clock. It isn’t the editing. It isn’t even the client revisions.
It’s the last forty-five minutes.
By then the adrenaline is gone. The client has left. Everybody’s mentally finished. All that’s left is wrapping extension cords, collapsing C-stands, loading Pelican cases, making trip after trip across a parking lot until somehow hundreds of pounds of metal, glass, and plastic have found their way back into the car.
Normally I don’t think twice about it.
That morning I did.
So I texted my assistant.
“Hey… any chance you’re around this afternoon?”
He wasn’t scheduled. The hard part of the shoot was over. I just knew there was no version of that day where I wanted to carry six C-stands, grip heads, rolling cases, and sandbags across another parking lot by myself.
He showed up anyway.
And I remember standing there watching him quietly work.
Rolling cables.
Collapsing stands.
Loading cases.
Walking back and forth between the studio and the Subaru with gear that, forty-eight hours earlier, I wouldn’t have given a second thought to carrying myself.
It was the first time in a long time that I became acutely aware of how physical this profession actually is.
People think photography is creative work.
And it is.
But creativity has weight.
Sometimes it’s twenty-five pounds of steel over your shoulder.
Sometimes it’s dragging rolling cases over cracked asphalt in ninety-degree heat.
Sometimes it’s realizing that the photograph everyone admires later only exists because somebody was willing to do a whole lot of ordinary, unglamorous work that never appears in the frame.
And standing there watching my assistant carry my C-stands across that parking lot, I had a realization I’d never really put into words before.
Maybe competence has a lot less to do with what happens behind the camera…
…and a lot more to do with understanding everything that happens around it.
Here’s the range of what this job actually looks like, when I’m honest about all of it. Sometimes you’re alone, pushing a cart through an office park before sunrise. Sometimes it’s you and one assistant. Sometimes it’s a full crew—a digital tech, a producer, a stylist, a couple of PAs—and somebody hands you a grande nitro cold brew with cinnamon before you’ve even asked because they already know your order. And yes, if anybody listening is wondering, that is my actual Starbucks order.
Those are all commercial photography. They’re just different points on the same road.
I have a friend who’s considerably further down that road than I am. He’s exceptionally good at what he does, wildly successful, and someone I genuinely admire. I probably follow about eighty-five percent of his advice without much hesitation. The other fifteen percent feels a little like someone explaining why I should really choose the Mercedes over the Audi… while I’m driving a Subaru. It’s probably excellent advice. It’s just not the conversation I’m having right now.
He doesn’t own C-stands anymore. He doesn’t own strobes. When he walks onto a set, that entire infrastructure has already been handled by people whose full-time job is making sure it’s there before he arrives. He tells me pretty regularly, “Patrick, you should always have a digital tech. Always have a producer. Always have a PA.”
In an ideal world, I completely agree with him.
But it’s 2026. I’m still fighting for every job that comes across my desk. Some weeks I’m fortunate enough to produce a five-figure campaign with a crew. Other weeks I’m loading my own lights into my Subaru before sunrise and hoping I remembered to charge every battery. That’s not me romanticizing the struggle. It’s just an honest description of where a lot of commercial photographers actually live.
The longer I thought about my assistant carrying those C-stands, the more I realized that leadership has almost nothing to do with being above the work. Leadership is understanding the work well enough to recognize when somebody else is struggling to do it.
If you’ve never wrapped a fifty-foot stinger cable, loaded your car at five in the morning, fought with your mac and your camera to try and connect to capture one because it randomly stopped talking to each other, or made the stupid back and forth ritual of setting up a seamless paper background by yourself, or hauled six C-stands across an asphalt parking lot in July... how would you know what you’re actually asking of the people you hire?
You wouldn’t.
You’d see an assistant moving a little slower at hour 9 and assume they were just lazy or disorganized or they didn’t care.
When you’ve done the work yourself, you gain two things you can’t get anywhere else: understanding and empathy.
You know how the job is supposed to be done, down to the details. And because you know how physically demanding it actually is, you know how to be kind. You know when to step in, grab a modifier, and help carry the load—because you’re a leader, not a boss standing around holding a clipboard.
That’s where real perspective comes from.
It doesn’t come from Instagram. It doesn’t come from YouTube tutorials. It doesn’t come from weekend workshops. Perspective comes from repetition. It comes from doing the work badly, then a little better, then a thousand more times until your hands know things your brain doesn’t consciously think about anymore.
And I think that’s really the audit.
It’s not whether you’re uniquely talented. It’s not whether your portfolio looks pretty. It’s this: Do you understand every part of the machine, so that when you’re responsible for the room, you actually know how to lead it?
That idea changed the way I hire people. It also changed the way I think about pricing.
A few weeks ago, I said something that a friend challenged me on. I said that if you can’t afford the help you need, and you can’t realistically do the job yourself, you shouldn’t take the job. He suggested that what I was describing was an ethics problem.
The more I sat with that, the less I agreed.
I don’t think it’s an ethical problem. I think it’s a risk management problem.
Showing up to an important commercial shoot with one camera body isn’t unethical. Running a production without liability insurance isn’t unethical. They’re just bad bets. You’re assuming reality is going to cooperate with you.
Professionalism is planning for the possibility that it won’t.
The assistant gets sick. Your back locks up because somebody rear-ended you on the 15 freeway the night before. A strobe bulb blows. The tether cable decides today’s the day it wants to drop connection. The client suddenly moves the deadline up three days.
The question was never whether something will go wrong. The question is whether the job survives when it does.
That’s what clients are actually paying for.
Not just photographs.
Margin.
Which connects right back to the money part of Ben's email that I mostly sidestepped earlier.
A nine-thousand-dollar commercial job sounds like a fantastic week. And sometimes it is. But before you start spending imaginary money, subtract the assistant's day rate, liability insurance, self-employment taxes, software subscriptions, replacing worn-out gear, health insurance, the unbilled editing hours, and all the administrative work that quietly surrounds every shoot.
What's left is still good.
It's just real.
Understanding that real number is no different from understanding how much gear you can physically carry before you need to ask for help. Same exact skill. One happens in a spreadsheet. The other happens in a parking lot at the end of a long day when your back is already telling you something you don't want to hear.
Ben asked about competence, and here’s where I think I land on it:
I don’t think competence is something you discover in a portfolio alone. It’s not your day rate. It’s not whether you show up with a full crew or whether you show up alone with a hand cart and a prayer.
It’s whether you still know what a C-stand weighs and feels like in your hands.
It’s whether you remember what this job actually costs—not just in dollars, but in your body, in your empathy for your crew, and in the specific, unglamorous understanding that only lives in your hands after you've done the work yourself. Badly at first, then better, until you stopped having to think about it.
That’s the real audit. Not the creative one from Episode 56. This one.
The one that happens in a warehouse parking lot, or a twelve-by-fifteen black box of a room with white seamless paper, or an on-ramp to Interstate 15 with your back already making plans you didn't agree to.
Stay close to the work.
Because the day you forget what it actually takes is the day you stop knowing how to lead the room.
Stay curious. Stay courageous.
And yeah... stay terrible.