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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.
You know, something only a photographer truly understands is the exact, plastic rubbing against metal sound while watching a camera slide off a surface, specifically a tripod head 6ft off the ground.
I made some of you cringe right now, didn’t I?
Watching nine thousand dollars succumb to gravity and stupidity in slow motion.
And, in that moment, your brain really doesn’t fully sink in the severity of whats happening.
The brain really just bypasses the intellect entirely.
I call it the Neanderthal override.
When a predator lunged from the tall grass, our ancestors didn’t sit to process and think about possible strategic maneuvers.
The body reacts before the mind fully knows the danger it’s in.
The nervous system fires an urgent signal straight to the limbs, letting the processing catch up later.
We live by these biological panic buttons.
And if you’re a parent, you’ve perhaps had your nine-month-old crawl toward the un-gated lip of a wooden staircase. We’re not judging you here by the way, every parent has stories - if you know you know.
ANd you know, as a parent, Before you consciously register the drop of your kid, the death-wish child is already scooped into your chest before your brain even realizes what happened.
Your heart is stuck in your throat, pounding.
It was a normal Thursday afternoon shoot in the same studio I normally shoot in. The lens attached was the beastly, three-and-a-half-pound Canon RF 28-70 f2, attached to the R5 Mark II. I placed the camera on my tripod—because sometimes I use a tripod. But as the client was finishing up makeup, I decided that I was going to freehand it.
Like the absent-minded ignoramus that I am, I turned the release dial on the Arca-Swiss head before I actually had the camera in hand. Never did that before. The front-heavy lens did the rest. Sent the whole rig toward the concrete studio floor with a velocity that still makes me wince.
I reached out my right hand. My middle finger took the weight of the camera and lens together. The top of the finger caught the bottom edge of the metal camera cage, bent back hard, and fractured the lower joint. But I caught it. Barely.
For the first few minutes, nothing. No pain. Just mild discomfort. But I knew I wasn’t good. I could feel something pop.
It wasn’t hurting because of a specific physiological response that happens.
When you fracture something and keep moving, the sympathetic nervous system—that ancient, loyal, completely misguided part of your biology—decides this is a threat worth managing. Vaso-constriction kicks in. Blood vessels near the injury contract. Pain signals queue up but don't fully transmit yet. Your body is buying you time to either run from the lion or kill it. It has no protocol for "continue photographing a Fortune 500 executive." So it just holds. Three minutes. Maybe four if you're lucky. And then the system releases, the fluid rushes in, and whatever you broke announces itself with full commitment.
Three minutes into the shoot my hand was the size of a softball and my middle finger had turned a beautiful shade of grape soda.
The shoot was a portrait session. A CEO. Hair and makeup had already finished. The communications director was standing off to the left checking her phone. I had forty minutes with the executive.
There was no version of that moment where I packed up the gear, apologized, and drove to the ER. That option did not exist. So I wrapped my hand around the grip and started making photographs. Making jokes. Directing. Smiling like everything was fine.
Everything was not fine.
My middle finger and half my palm were so swollen at that point it looked like I was permanently flicking someone off. I couldn't move the finger at all.
Nobody in that room knew. The CEO didn't know. The communications director didn't know. The makeup artist didn't know. The only person who knew was my friend Bronson, who owned the studio. I had to have him raise a C-stand for me a couple of times.
I smiled. I directed. I kept my voice even and my expression relaxed. And somewhere underneath all of that, my finger was screaming.
The images were good. Of course they were good. They looked as if nothing happened.
Because it didn't. At least not to the client.
My name is Patrick Fore and this is The Terrible Creative. Where we have honest conversations about creativity, identity, and the parts of this life nobody puts in the god-damned brochure.
This is Episode 68. I'm calling it "Playing Hurt."
Today we're somewhere between what this job actually costs and what we tell themselves it costs. Like I’ve said a lot, I don't have a clean answer. But I've been in it long enough that it's worth saying out loud
There's a version of this job, professional photographer, that looks incredible from the outside.
Just those words, “Professional photographer” sounds cool doesn’t it? Sounds impressive at dinner parties. Or, at least it used to, before everyone and their uncle called themselves one.
And I get it, I’m sure you get it too…
The gear. The access. The clients. The portfolio. Someone who doesn't do this for a living sees the finished images and thinks: what a life. I’ve had multiple people ask me, “So what, you just hang out with and photograph attractive models all day.”
“Yeah Steve, and then after someone brings me caviar and a gin martini before I get my post photoshoot massage.”
Sometimes they aren’t wrong. Not about the massage and caviar, but about the other stuff you know.
They're just looking at the output and missing everything that produced it.
The broken finger is an extreme example. But it's not an anomaly.
Ask any working creative who has been in it long enough and you'll find a version of this story.
The musician who played a full set with a torn rotator cuff. The designer who delivered a brand identity the week her mother died. The writer who filed on deadline while running a 103 degree fever because the alternative was explaining to an editor why the piece was late.
Nobody talks about this part. The industry doesn't talk about it. The gear reviews don't talk about it. The "how I built my photography business" YouTube videos definitely don't talk about it.
What they talk about is inspiration. Process. Workflow. The clean, photogenic version of creative work where the problems are interesting and the solutions are elegant.
I call it the Adobe Marketing version of the Creative life. Where you see an inspirational snapshot of an attractive 20-something sketching a new dress design on her ipad while smiling, then chucks it into her bag when she reaches her stop. Then you see her having coffee with smiling clients where she shows her work, everyone is smiling and happy. The sun is shining the coffee is delicious and the creative work feels like a dream.
And I think that version exists. I've had days like that. They're real.
Not sketching dresses on a New York subway, but you get the point.
They're also not the whole story.
There's a concept I keep coming back to when I think about what separates the people who last in this from the people who don't. And it's not talent. It's not even work ethic in the way that term usually gets used, like a moral virtue, like some people just have more of it than others.
It's something closer to identity fusion.
When the work is load-bearing, when it's not what you do but who you are, the calculus around stopping changes completely. The amateur picks up the camera when it feels good. Puts it down when it doesn't. The work is a relationship they can walk away from.
The professional doesn't have that exit. Or more accurately, the professional stopped being able to locate that exit a long time ago. The work and the self got tangled up somewhere around year three or four, and untangling them stopped feeling like an option. So when the finger breaks, you don't weigh the cost. You just move. The body organizes around the pain and keeps going because there is no version of you that knows how to stop.
I think I started learning this script when I was a kid, playing on a Midwestern Little League team and getting nailed right in the ribs by a fifty-mile-an-hour fastball from a pitcher who looked more like nineteen than twelve. In in that moment, as a batter you raise your hand to tell the umpire you need ten seconds just to absorb the impact? To let the wind catch up to your lungs so you can swallow the pain? You do it because, in that specific moment, a moderate bruise to the abdomen doesn't matter. Your team is down by one run, it’s the bottom of the final inning, and there is a runner on third.
After you take the hit, you toss the bat and trot down to first base with your chin up, performing like absolutely nothing happened. Inside though, every single molecule of your body is screaming at you to cry, but you don't, because the opposing bench is watching and a grandstand full of parents expects you to be tough. You literally take it for the team. You stand on that base ready to run like a bat out of hell toward second, praying your teammate Sean makes it across home plate to tie the game. You are radiating pain under your jersey, but you are desperate to be the game-winning run.
It is a spectacular, dangerous piece of human engineering isn’t it? As adaptable mammals, we possess this terrifying capacity to completely override our own biological alarms.
Even when the internal dashboard is blinking red like an obnoxious Christmas tree, our focus, our stubbornness, and or our sheer stupidity can lock onto the objective and ignore the wreckage. We treat this ability to play through the trauma like a badge of honor. We look at our scars and tell ourselves it's proof of our dedication.
I want to be honest about the fact that it's also a warning sign.
Because I've been freelancing for a while now. And one thing this life has made clear, that corporate life obscured, is how little margin actually exists.
At an company or agency there are buffers. Other people. A structure that absorbs some of the shock. You can call in sick and the project doesn't collapse. You can have a bad week and someone covers. The institution carries part of the weight.
Freelance strips all of that out.
When I'm sick, the shoot doesn't have a backup. When I'm burned out, the invoice doesn't get paid by someone else. When I have $11 in my checking account and a $4,000 shoot to execute, those two facts exist simultaneously in the same body, and the client sees exactly none of it.
That $11 situation. I want to stay with that for a second.
There's a particular kind of divided focus and irony that comes with photographing wealth while being broke. You're standing in a room with someone whose watch costs more than your car, and you're thinking about whether your card is going to decline at the gas station on the way home. You're directing talent, managing light, running the shot list, and somewhere in the back of your skull a small, cold, very specific anxiety is doing the math on your checking account.
And you smile. And you direct. And the images are still good.
Because they have to be.
I had a conversation recently with some friends. We were talking about jobs, and the topic of firefighters came up. In a moment of what seems like a coded confession, I said something.
Have you ever said a thing, but it's really just a code or a way to mask something below the surface? This was that.
I told them I wished I’d become a firefighter.
I wanted the clarity you know. I was thirsty for it these days.
A firefighter climbs onto the truck, completes the shift, and steps off. The fire is out or it isn't. The target stays physical. It doesn't change its mind about what it wants to be. You wake up every day understanding the objective. You can build a career on predictable patterns. Even the chaos and danger of fire is predictable. Houses have been burning the same way since the beginning. There will always be a need for a firefighter. The firefighter isn't worried about his job being taken by AI or whether the city will pay him this week or in three.
The creative life doesn't work like that. The target moves. The definition of good changes. The client who loved your work last year wants something different this year and isn't entirely sure what. You wake up some mornings and the thing you were certain about yesterday has gone soft overnight.
And you still have to show up. Still have to perform at full capacity. Still have to smile and direct and keep your voice even.
There's no shift. There's no clock-out. There's no moment where the fire is definitively out and you get to go home and decompress with people who understand what you just walked through.
There's just the next job.
Here's what nobody tells the people romanticizing the creative life.
Being a professional creative doesn't mean you do the work when you're inspired and take a break when you're not. That's the amateur version. That's the version that looks good in a YouTube thumbnail or in Adobe marketing.
The professional version is this: you do the work at the highest level you're capable of, on the worst days of your life, for people who will never know what it cost.
The broken finger. The pneumonia on a corporate shoot where you're running around a location for eight hours because you don't have an assistant that day. The 4am drive to LA when you’re tired and getting over a sinus infection to get to a job you agreed to six months ago when it seemed manageable. The shoot where you're directing a room full of people and smiling and problem-solving while your bank account is in the single digits.
That's the job. That's the whole job.
And the people standing outside it, looking in, thinking about making the leap, what they see is the portfolio. The clients. The freedom. The creative autonomy.
They don't see the finger.
So where does the capacity for this come from?
I've thought about this for a long time and I don't have a clean answer. But here's where I've landed.
It doesn't come from discipline. Discipline is a system. You can build discipline and you can also lose it. Discipline requires maintenance.
What I'm describing is older than discipline. It's the thing that operates when discipline has already failed, when the motivation is gone, when the inspiration dried up three weeks ago and the shoot is in four hours.
It's closer to muscle memory than willpower. Except the muscle isn't in your hand. It's in whatever part of you decided, a long time ago, that this is what you are. Not what you do. What you are.
When that's true, stopping doesn't feel like an option. It feels like disappearing.
And so you don't stop. You wrap your hand around the grip. You smile at the CEO. You keep your voice even. You make the images.
And they're good. Because that's what you do. Because that's what you are.
There's a cost to all this. I want to name it before I let you go, because pretending it doesn't exist would be dishonest and this show doesn't do that.
I am that person. The one who never stops, who stuffs it down and keeps moving. I've built a version of myself around that capacity and if I'm being honest, I'm proud of it. Not in a chest-puffing way. In the way you're proud of something that cost you something real to develop.
And that person is also running on something finite.
The body keeps score. The accumulated weight of shooting through sickness and pain and financial dread and grief you set aside because there was a job to do, it doesn't disappear. It relocates. It finds somewhere to live in you and it waits.
Recovery isn't a protocol. There's no system for this, no checklist, no optimization.
And what I've found is that it happens in the spaces after. The quiet drive home when the shoot is wrapped and the adrenaline is still burning off and the radio is too much so you just drive in silence. The day after delivery when you finally feel the full weight of what you carried. It happens over drinks with other creatives when you tell the story of the busted finger and the CEO shoot and everybody at the table, cringes and laughs at the same time because everyone has a version of their own, and you laugh, they laugh, and the laughing is the processing.
The pain becomes part of the story. The part worth telling. The part that keeps your ego from getting too inflated. The pain, the moments of the most cringe keeps from getting high on our own supply.
Because here's what Little League actually taught me before I knew it was teaching me anything.
You take the pitch in the ribs. You raise your hand, you take your ten seconds, you let the wind catch up to your lungs. And then you trot down to first base with your chin up like nothing happened. Inside every molecule is screaming. Outside you are ready to run.
That's the job. That's been the job since you were nine years old standing in a Midwestern batter's box with Sean on third and a grandstand full of parents watching.
You don't get to fall down. Not because someone told you not to. Because there's a runner on third and the game is not over.
You don't prepare for playing hurt. You simply discover whether you can handle the impact when the moment arrives. But what you can do is give yourself permission, afterward, to actually feel what the shift cost you.
You don't prepare for playing hurt. You simply discover whether you can handle the impact when the moment arrives. But what you can do is give yourself permission, afterward, to actually feel what the shift cost you.
Forget performative resilience. Skip turning your trauma into a personal brand or a hustle-culture thumbnail. Just sit with the fact that it was brutal, and you did it anyway, and let that mean something to you—even if nobody else on earth ever validates it.
Even if that validation is just a quiet hour out in the park with your dog, sitting in the grass, where absolutely nobody is asking you for a single deliverable.
The joint in my middle finger still clicks when the winter weather hits San Diego. I still don't go to the emergency room until the data is in the bag. Old habits are a hell of a thing to kill.
Stay curious. Stay courageous. Stay terrible.