Office Hours with Patrick
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Office Hours is a one-on-one, 60-ish minute conversation to help you work through whatever you’re trying to figure out. No agenda. No curriculum. No pitch. Just honest feedback, thoughtful questions, and a fresh perspective.
Learn more or book your session:
https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours
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.
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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.
What is The Terrible Creative?
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.