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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.
79 - Voice
Here’s the cruelest thing about getting good at photography: eventually, you run out of excuses.
I’ve spent years learning how to make photographs. Put a person in front of me and I know how to make a portrait. Give me a terrible conference room with fluorescent lights and beige walls and I can probably make it look intentional. Hand me a complicated brief, a tight deadline, a nervous subject, shitty weather, whatever—I’ll figure something out.
And I think most photographers who have been doing this professionally for a while know that feeling.
Maybe you photograph weddings. You can walk into a dark reception hall with two hundred people moving in every direction and somehow know where you need to be before the moment happens. Maybe you photograph families, and you know exactly what to do when the four-year-old decides fifteen minutes into the session that he’s fucking done with family photographs. Maybe it’s sports, portraits, products, concerts, whatever.
Eventually, you get good at responding.
There’s a person in front of you. There’s a moment happening. There’s an assignment. Somebody hired you. Somebody needs something. Even when nobody gives you a literal shot list, the world has given you a reason to pick up the camera.
And then, finally, a break shows up.
For me, it’s usually a Saturday morning.
The inbox is clear. Nobody needs anything. There’s no client waiting for photographs. No subject standing in front of me. No deadline. Nobody telling me what counts as success.
For once, I can photograph absolutely anything I want.
So I walk into my garage.
And there it all sits.
Cameras. Glass. Strobes. Softboxes. C-stands. Cases full of triggers and little pieces of anodized aluminum that cost eighty bucks for reasons no human being can adequately explain. Thousands and thousands of dollars of photographic capability sitting there in the dark.
And I know how to use every fucking piece of it.
That’s what makes this so uncomfortable.
I spent years becoming good at answering photographic questions. Where should I put the light? What lens do I need? How do I photograph this person? How do I make this ugly room work? How do I get the photograph when everything is going wrong?
But standing there in my garage on a Saturday morning, nobody has given me a question.
I have to come up with one myself.
And a lot of the time?
I have absolutely no fucking idea.
Every physical tool required to make a photograph is sitting right there on the workbench.
Except a reason to press the shutter.
For years, I had a very convenient place to hide from that problem. First, I needed a better camera. Then I needed to understand lighting. Then color. Composition. Retouching. Processing.
And the annoying thing is, I really did need to learn all of that.
But eventually I ran completely out of technical excuses.
The camera wasn’t stopping me anymore. My ability wasn’t stopping me anymore.
Which left me with a question I had somehow managed to spend years becoming a photographer without ever really answering:
What do I actually want to photograph when nobody else is asking me to?
HANDSHAKE
I'm Patrick Fore, and this is The Terrible Creative—where we use photography to have honest conversations about creativity, identity, and what it really takes to make things for a living.
This is Part Three, the final episode in a series called Photography: Gear, Craft & Voice.
Two weeks ago, we started in a camera store. We talked about gear and borrowed taste—about how, before any of us know enough about photography to decide what's good for ourselves, somebody else fills in the blanks.
Last week, we talked about craft. About the gap between the photograph your taste can imagine and the photograph your hands can actually produce. About repetition, experimentation, auditing your mistakes, and eventually reaching the point where the camera begins to disappear.
Which sounds great. Except once the camera gets out of the way, you're left entirely alone with your own ideas. Or, if we're being honest, a complete lack of them.
So this week, we're talking about voice.
When I say voice, I don't mean finding a recognizable color grade. I'm not talking about branding or choosing three adjectives you want people to associate with your Instagram feed.
I'm talking about having something to say. A point of view. Looking at something a thousand other people have walked past and finding something there that you can't stop thinking about.
Because you can buy the camera. You can learn the science. You can study light until you can walk into almost any room and know what to do with it. But nobody can teach you what deserves your attention.
Let's get into it.
ACT ONE: THE SILENCE AND THE WOUND
Last week, I talked about lying on my couch after wrapping a complicated commercial shoot. The job went well. I solved every problem. I came home. And lying there in my quiet house afterward, I had this deeply unsatisfying reaction to something I'd spent ten years trying to become capable of doing:
So what?
That's where we left off. And I think this episode begins the morning after that question.
Because commercial photography gives you something personal work never will: an assignment.
A client calls and tells you what matters. They give you the problem to solve. And I fucking love problems. Give me a terrible conference room and tell me I have twenty minutes to make the CEO look interesting, and my brain instantly wakes up. Problem. Solution. Problem. Solution. You get very good at that after enough years.
And commercial work gives you one more crucial thing: a place for failure to land.
If a commercial shoot falls flat, there are a hundred built-in places to distribute the blame. The brief was confused. The location sucked. The wardrobe was wrong. The weather turned. We only had fifteen minutes with the subject. Even when those aren't cheap excuses, they provide an immediate, comforting context around the result.
Personal work strips every bit of that context away.
Nobody asked you to stand in the garage. You chose the subject. You chose the idea. You decided it was worth pursuing.
Which means if you step up to the camera on a Saturday morning, press the shutter, and what comes back is boring or completely empty… that failure is entirely yours.
And maybe that's why standing in the garage feels so terrifying.
Whenever I don't know the question, I have developed an extraordinary ability to find other things to do. I can research a lens for three hours. I can watch someone compare the autofocus tracking of two cameras I have zero intention of buying. I can reorganize my Capture One catalog. I can redesign my website for the third time this year. I can save references, build moodboards, or buy another lighting tutorial.
All of it feels like work. That's why it's so dangerous. Creative avoidance rarely looks like sitting on the couch eating chips; it looks like relentless productivity.
Reorganizing my catalog isn't just procrastination. It's safety.
As long as I'm cleaning files, I'm still a professional who knows how to operate inside the rules. The second I pick up the camera for myself, I risk finding out that all this technical capability has been hiding something I really don't want to face:
Maybe I don't actually have anything to say.
That silence is uncomfortable because there is no authority standing behind you with the answer. No Canon representative. No YouTube creator. No art director.
Just you, sitting with the fear that your competence is an empty shell.
ACT TWO: PERMISSION AND THE BATHTUB
When we look for inspiration to break that silence, most of us do what we were trained to do: we reverse-engineer other people's work.
I see a great portrait, and within three seconds, my brain is dismantling it. Big source camera left. Probably feathered. 35mm lens. Pulled saturation in the shadows.
It's useful. It's how I learned. But occasionally I'll catch myself doing it and realize what I didn't ask: Why did I stop scrolling? What about this image actually affected me? Why do I give a shit?
There's a name for that reflex. Psychologists call it the Einstellung (Ein-shtel-ung) effect—the more of an expert you become at solving one kind of problem, the more your brain reaches for the familiar solution before it even looks at a new one. Expertise doesn't just make you capable; it makes you predictable, even to yourself.
My photographer brain is over there measuring the imaginary softbox, turning inspiration back into a mechanical recipe. Because a recipe gives me a map again. And drawing your own map is infinitely harder.
Eventually, if you stay in this long enough, the material has to start coming from somewhere else.
Early photography education teaches you what aperture does. Later education, if you're paying attention, stops being about photography at all. You can spend twenty years expanding your photographic vocabulary without ever expanding the life that vocabulary is supposed to be describing.
Not from photography tutorials, but from everything else. Literature. Movies. Paintings. Arguments. Relationships. Getting older. Making money. Losing money. Being embarrassed. Being bored. Walking around somewhere you've never been, or sitting somewhere you've been ten thousand times and suddenly noticing something you somehow missed.
And then, occasionally, something small gets through the filter.
For me, one of those photographs involved a bathtub, a toilet, a model named Alison, and a copy of Vogue.
Which is a sentence I'm pretty sure nobody at Taylor Guitars ever expected me to say when they handed me the studio keys.
I'd spent years making respectable photographs. Clean commercial frames. Algorithm-friendly portraits. Images that made sense. Even my personal work had an invisible approval committee sitting behind it—asking if it would fit the portfolio, if clients would like it, if it looked "professional," or if my mother would approve.
Then I had this strange, persistent thought: a high-fashion model sitting on a toilet in a cramped apartment bathroom, reading Vogue, completely unbothered. Topless. Beautiful, directional light. High-end fashion imagery staged in the least glamorous room in the house.
I liked the contradiction. That was pretty much it.
There was no manifesto. I didn't have an artist statement explaining the complex relationship between consumerism and porcelain architecture. I just thought it was interesting.
So we set it up. At one point, I was literally wedged into a dry bathtub, my back jammed against the tile, trying to get the low angle I wanted while she sat there reading the magazine. Click.
It wasn't a complex shoot. The lighting wasn't revolutionary.
Which forced me to ask a much harder question later: Why had it taken me so fucking long to make something like that?
I had possessed the technical capability to light and execute that exact frame for five years. Nothing about a new camera or a specific modifier suddenly enabled "woman on a toilet reading Vogue."
So what had been stopping me?
Permission.
The technical barrier had disappeared years before the psychological barrier did. I didn't need another lighting lesson; I needed the courage to execute an idea that didn't come with a guaranteed stamp of approval.
Voice doesn't begin when you finally figure out how to make an image. Voice begins when you give yourself permission to chase an idea that might end up looking completely ridiculous.
ACT THREE: CAPABILITY VERSUS ATTENTION
I don't think you can see your own voice while you're building it.
"Building" is probably the wrong word anyway, because building implies a blueprint. You know what it's supposed to look like before you start. My experience has been the exact opposite.
You make things. Some are decent. A lot are bad. Some get attention on the internet and become completely meaningless to you six months later. Others barely register when you post them, but five years later, you're still thinking about them.
Over time, the work starts leaving evidence behind.
Certain subjects keep showing up. Certain tones. Certain tensions. Certain jokes. You look backward at five years of personal files and realize you've been quietly circling the exact same idea the whole time.
Think about a photographer who has spent fifteen years photographing hummingbirds.
Thousands upon thousands of frames. Same ridiculous little bird. Same dawn alarm. Same massive, heavy lens.
At some point, technical difficulty stops explaining their behavior. They solved the technical problem a decade ago—they know how to photograph a hummingbird.
So why are they still standing there at six in the morning?
Because craft and voice do two entirely different things.
Craft expands the number of things you are capable of photographing. Voice does something almost opposite—it keeps narrowing your attention.
The generalist can walk into any room and photograph anything fluently. Cars, portraits, food, architecture, street. Technically flawless, but nothing keeps pulling them back.
The hummingbird photographer has surrendered to an obsession. Their work isn't evidence of what they can execute; it's evidence of what they cannot stop paying attention to.
Maybe mastery isn't demonstrated by how many technical questions you can answer. Maybe voice begins revealing itself in the questions you can't stop asking.
You don't need to purify yourself of your influences to get there, either. Episode One started with the fact that all of us borrow taste. I still carry pieces of the photographers who taught me how to see. Tom Hoops is in there. Commercial advertising is in there. Movies are in there.
The goal isn't to be untouched by the world. Real creative insight almost never shows up when you sit at a desk and demand it. It shows up when two completely unrelated parts of your life collide—when an old argument, a book you read, or a weird Tuesday afternoon runs straight into a lighting setup.
The goal is what happens after all those borrowed influences spend twenty years colliding with your actual, messy life. Your failures, your heartbreaks, your weird Tuesday afternoons.
Eventually, the work starts looking less like your heroes, and more like you.
RESOLUTION
Three episodes ago, we started in a camera store. And that's still the right place to end.
In the beginning, photography gives you neat answers everywhere. The illuminated logos hang above the glass counters. Canon, Sony, Nikon, Fuji. Pick a team. Someone will tell you which lens to buy, and someone will show you what a "good" photograph looks like.
For a while, that's useful. You need something to borrow.
Then you take the camera home, and you realize that owning the tool doesn't mean you know how to make anything that matters.
So you work. You practice. You fail. You audit. The reflections get cleaner, the setups get faster, and the image on the LCD screen finally starts matching the image in your head. The technical parts quietly step into the background.
And then… Saturday morning. The garage.
No brief. No client. No shot list. Just you and every tool you could ever need.
I still stand there sometimes. I still don't always know what to photograph.
And maybe that's where the whole series lands:
Gear gives you capability. Craft gives you fluency. And then eventually, if you're lucky, both of them get quiet enough for you to hear the question underneath all of it:
What do I actually care about?
The difference now is that the empty garage doesn't feel like a threat anymore. It's allowed to be empty.
You don't need to panic and fill the silence with a new lens purchase, a YouTube tutorial, an Instagram scroll, or a safe photograph you already know how to make.
You can just leave the camera on the workbench. You can go read a book, watch a movie, have an argument, get bored, or walk down a street you've passed a thousand times until you finally notice something strange.
And then, three days later, while you're driving home, something hits you sideways.
Wait. I want to see what that looks like.
And suddenly, the camera has a job again.
Stay curious. And yeah… stay terrible.