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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.
78 - The Craft
Okay so there’s a specific moment that happens right after the camera unboxing high wears off.
You spent weeks chasing the fever, reading review sheets, and convincing yourself that a new camera was going to change things. But then you actually stand in a room, turn the lights on, and try to make something interesting, something you can be proud of you know? Something you can proudly post on Instagram that shows off all the capabilities of that new camera. Maybe even, let’s be honest, justifies internally the purchase of the camera in the first place.
And in your head, the photograph is already clear. You can see how the light should fall, where the shadows should sit, and what made you want to take it in the first place.
So you lift the camera to your eye and press the shutter.
Then you look at the LCD screen. Expecting something amazing, something that would be better than the old camera you have that's now sitting on a shelf as evidence of progression.
And what’s staring back at you isn't even in the same god damned universe as the image living in your head. It’s flat. It’s dull. You zoom in on the display, hunting for something in the frame that you like, meanwhile, that quiet, familiar disappointment settles in.
This my friends, is the Gap.
The gap is the space between the photograph your taste can imagine and the photograph your hands can actually produce.
And this is where the romance of photography dies and the labor of craft begins.
So last week, we talked about borrowed taste. We talked about how easy it is to inherit someone else’s definition of what a good image looks like before you’ve made enough work to know if you agree.
This week however, the hangover sets in. The high wears off, and you find yourself standing alone with a lens—discovering that wanting to make something meaningful and actually having the chops to pull it off are two completely different things.
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 Two of a three-part series called Photography: Gear, Craft & Voice.
Last week, we stood in a camera store. We talked about how all of us inherit a definition of what good photography looks like—from camera companies, YouTube, magazines, Instagram, and the photographers we admire. Long before we know how to make a photograph, somebody hands us a pre-packaged blueprint of what one should look like.
But eventually… you have to step up to the workbench and make the thing yourself.
Today’s episode is about craft. About that long, awkward, frustrating stretch where your taste is miles ahead of your technical ability. It’s about the thousands of invisible repetitions nobody applauds. The experiments. The failures. The late nights. The tiny adjustments that seem insignificant until one day they aren’t.
Because I think people misunderstand what craft actually is you know? It isn’t about collecting techniques. It isn’t about memorizing lighting diagrams you found on Instagram. It isn’t even about becoming technically impressive.
The purpose of craft is much simpler than that: it’s to get the camera out of the way.
It's about reaching a point where you stop thinking about aperture, flash ratios, and where to put the softbox… because your attention finally has room for something far more important.
Let’s get into it.
ACT ONE: THE GAP AND THE AUDIT
So back in 2018, I was hired at a company here in San Diego - Taylor Guitars. As a budding new professional commercial photographer I was so stoked to get this job. I can’t tell you how excited I was to esteem the title, “Taylor Guitars Lead Photographer”
But looking back, between you and me, I had absolutely no business photographing guitars.
Well… maybe that’s a little dramatic. I mean, I knew photography. At least I thought I did. I had photographed people. I’d photographed basic commercial products. I understood exposure, and I knew basically how to fire a studio strobe. And if you had asked me back then if I knew how to light something, I would’ve looked you in the eye and said yes.
Then they I remember the second week after my predecessor had left. There I was, alone, on a Monday morning, sitting in a quiet photo studio in this industrial office park connected to the maintenance building a couple of warehouse guys pulled up in a white van to deliver the first batch of guitars I was told to photograph. 4 to be exact. Updated models that needed a full suite of updated images for the website.
Now, if you’ve never photographed a high-end acoustic guitar before, let me save you a little pain. They are stunning works of art. They are also absolute assholes if you don’t know what you’re doing.
And I really didn’t know what I was doind.
Depending on the finish, everything about them reflects. The high-gloss finish reflects. The chrome tuning pegs reflect. The steel strings reflect. The mother-of-pearl inlays reflect. Every single wrong decision you make with a softbox immediately shows up somewhere you don’t want it.
I remember standing there looking at this gorgeous instrument thinking, I’ve got this, how hard can it be.
And in my head, I already knew what the photograph looked like. The wood grain was going to glow with warmth. The curves of the body would have just enough contrast to feel sculptural. The reflections on the chrome tuning keys would be clean, razor-sharp, and elegant. I was confident that I could get these done, send them to the art director and receive a whole heap of praise.
So I set up some lights, plugged the camera into the studio iMac, and pressed the shutter.
It was hot garbage.
I’m not saying that to be humble.
It was a dog shit sandwich.
Every mistake I’d made was staring back at me from the iMac screen. The softbox. The white ceiling tiles. The studio clutter. My own dumb outline standing there. The guitar had somehow managed to photograph everything in the room except itself.
And here’s what made it infinitely worse: nobody needed to tell me I’d failed. I already knew.
And my predecessor at Taylor had been exceptional. Every single day, I had to walk down the hallways past massive, gorgeous photographs he’d shot. They were hanging on the walls outside of the marketing department. They were printed in company catalogs, and featured on magazine covers. I kept copies of those magazines at my workstation in the studio. For the first few months, I would look back and forth at the screen, then back at the magazine images. Back at the screen. Analyzing every difference, every flow, every shadow, every highlight.
It wasn’t about comparing talent. I wasn’t thinking the question, "Am I talented enough?" Or "Am I a real photographer?"
But "Why does his photograph work… and mine doesn’t? What was the missing X factor?"
Those questions changed everything. Because once I stopped worrying about whether I was good enough to have the job, I stopped exercising ego and became obsessed with understanding cause and effect.
Now, I know I was lucky. I had a key to a studio, access to expensive instruments, and a commercial space I could lock up at 10:00 PM after everyone else went home. Most working photographers don't have an institutional playground like that.
But the studio key wasn't what taught me. The method was.
You don't need an eight-thousand-dollar guitar or a corporate gear expense account to do this. You need a ceramic mug from your kitchen, a single adjustable desk lamp, and a ten-dollar piece of black foam board set up on your dining room table. The physics of light don't care about the market value of the room you're standing in.
After the staff left for the night, I’d turn on the studio lights, put on John Coltrane, and start over.
Not with another guitar. The same guitar. The same light. The same camera position.
One variable at a time. That became the unbreakable rule.
Move the softbox two inches to the left. Take a frame. Move it two inches higher. Take another frame. Turn the guitar five degrees on the table. Watch what happened to the chrome. Watch what happened to the specular highlights on the glossy top.
Again. Again. Again.
I wasn’t trying to make portfolio pieces anymore. I was building a vocabulary. If I moved the light here… what changed over there? If I placed a black card right beside the neck… what happened to the reflection in the frets?
And this is the part people miss when they talk about putting in their ten thousand hours: doing something a thousand times doesn't teach you a damn thing if you aren't asking what changed every single time. Repetition without an audit is just cementing bad habits under the guise of hard work. Craft requires an audit.
Slowly, almost without noticing it, patterns started emerging out of the chaos. One night I’d finally figure out how to isolate the reflections in the chrome tuning pegs. Another night I’d realize the glossy top wasn’t the enemy at all—it was simply a mirror showing me exactly where my light actually was in three-dimensional space.
I started carrying around a small black Field Notes notebook. I sketched lighting diagrams. I wrote down power settings, distances, angles, and lens focal lengths. Things that worked. Things that didn’t.
At the time, it felt obsessive and mechanical. But looking back, I wasn’t just building lighting notes. I was building trust in myself.
Because the more experiments I ran, the less I needed to open that notebook. The more I audited those mistakes, the less time I spent making them. The answers slowly moved off the paper and into my hands.
And I think that’s what craft actually is—the slow, unglamorous process of turning conscious thought into physical instinct.
Until one day… the camera begins to disappear.
ACT TWO: THE RECIPE VS. THE PRINCIPLE
Eventually, those late nights paid off. Not all at once. There wasn’t some cinematic movie montage where everything magically clicked and I walked into work the next morning transformed into Roger Deakins.
It happened much slower than that. One morning I realized I hadn’t spent thirty minutes fighting reflections on my first shot. I wasn’t calculating where to place the key light anymore; I was just placing it there.
The black notebook stayed closed on my desk. The camera stopped feeling like an adversarial machine I had to outsmart and started feeling like a natural extension of how I looked at a room.
That’s what all those late nights had bought me. Not artistic genius. Freedom. Freedom from having to perform technical math every single time I pressed the shutter button.
And I thought that was the destination. I thought that was what becoming a professional photographer meant.
Then, a few years later, in 2024, after I left Taylor and went out on my own, I landed a major commercial architecture job.
It was a full production. Producer, creative director, agency reps, talent, wardrobe, hair and makeup, assistants, and a full gaffer crew with ten heavy strobes. One of those high-stakes shoots where every minute ticking by costs somebody real money.
Now, here’s the embarrassing part: by this point, I already knew how to light. I wasn’t the insecure kid at Taylor Guitars anymore. But architecture? High-end commercial interiors? To be honest, I hadn’t really done that kind of thing before. So here I was again, stepping into a situation where I forced myself to sink or swim. This has basically the pattern of my life.
So I did what so many photographers do when insecurity creeps back in: I bought a course.
Actually, I bought a fantastic course by a renowned architectural shooter. His process was rock-solid. His technique was immaculate. He walked through his exact workflow step-by-step, and on set that morning, I followed it to a T.
Tripod locked down. Ambient base exposure first. Light the left quadrant. Light the right quadrant. Pop a strobe behind the sofa. Composite the fifteen frames together later in Photoshop. Methodical. Precise. Professional.
Thirty minutes into the shoot, the producer walked over, leaned down, and whispered in my ear: "The creative director is getting really frustrated."
The agency needed to see the entire space. They needed to evaluate the composition, check the talent interaction, and approve the frame so we could move on to the next setup. But they couldn't see a damn thing on my monitor because I was sitting there capturing isolated lighting plates for a composite I wouldn't build until Tuesday night.
I was faithfully executing somebody else’s recipe. A process that wasn’t my own. A process that didn’t work for the creative director.
And this shit wasn’t covered in the $199 course.
I remember stepping off set, walking outside, and sitting down on a cold concrete bench in a building that was still half under construction. It smelled like fresh paint, drywall dust, and copper wiring. Inside, there were fifteen people standing around waiting for me to figure my life out, with ten strobes sitting dead in the dark.
I looked down at my hands and thought, "What the hell am I doing?"
And then something happened that completely shifted how I understand technical knowledge. I stopped thinking about architectural photography tutorials. About following the rules of someone else. In that moment, that quiet desperate moment, I thought about guitars and my black fieldnotes notebook.
Which sounds absurd, but it saved me. At Taylor, I never started by trying to light individual parts of the guitar. I would setup my lights into a set position for every guitar. I had marks spiked in the ground. ANd in this shot I would call it, “Shooting for the moon” I would try to capture the guitar with one image, one exposure. After a couple of years I got really efficient at this. I had photographed so many guitars, I knew what I could get away with in post production and what I couldn’t. What warranted spending 10 minutes trying to dial in lighting for and what I could just mask in Capture One.
And sometimes that “Moon Shot” worked. I could photograph a whole guitar in one image with the power of Capture One. Other guitars, or other applications, I would need to make anywhere between 2 and 6 exposures to make sure I lit every part of that guitar correctly.
And standing outside in the damp southern California air, it suddenly clicked: this multi-million-dollar architectural space wasn't any fundamentally different from an acoustic guitar. It was just a really big one.
I walked back inside, abandoned the course workflow, and changed everything. We lit the entire room at once for a clean plate. (Strobes on, then one with strobes off) We then brought the talent into the frame into their positions, established the base mood, and gave the creative director the exact hero image they needed to approve. (The Moon Shot) Then, once the client approved, a gaffer assistant ran around with a strobe and a 4 foot octa to light each cast member separately in their same approved position.
So from the agency's perspective, the energy on set transformed instantly. From my perspective, my entire career shifted.
Because that day I realized I hadn't actually failed at architectural photography—I had failed because I mistook a recipe from another photographer for a principle.
And those two things are worlds apart.
We buy courses and tutorials because recipes sell certainty. On a high-stakes set where client money is burning, we reach for recipes as emotional security blankets because we’re terrified of looking incompetent.
But recipes encode somebody else's constraints. The photographer in that tutorial was shooting in a controlled environment with zero agency pressure and unlimited time. My reality had a competing constraint: a live creative director who needed real-time visual proof that we had the shot.
Recipes only solve familiar problems in controlled environments. Principles let you figure out which rules you’re dealing with in real time—and which ones you're allowed to break to survive the shoot.
ACT THREE: WHEN THE CAMERA DISAPPEARS (AND THE DARK SIDE OF CRAFT)
I think most photographers misunderstand what mastery feels like. We imagine it feels like swagger. Like absolute certainty. Like walking onto every set with a chest full of confidence, knowing exactly what you’re going to do.
That hasn’t been my experience. For me, mastery feels quieter than that. It feels like forgetting.
Not forgetting photography—forgetting the camera.
There was a time when every single frame demanded a thousand conscious micro-decisions. What’s my shutter speed? Where does the key light go? Should I use a parabolic or a softbox? How do I keep this glare out of the glass? Every photograph was an exhausting math puzzle. Every mistake felt catastrophically expensive.
Then, almost without noticing, those questions dominating my thoughts when I was making images
And hear me, it wasn’t because I wasn’t thinking about those things, I was, but in a more subconscious and intuitive kinda way. Kinda like how you don’t think about the mechanics of driving, you just drive.
The technique stopped being so loud. The science of it all no longer drove the bus. The camera itself began to disappear.
And that’s what all that practice buys you. Not just prettier pictures, but space. Mental space. Creative capacity. The freedom to walk into a fluorescent-lit corporate office or an ugly, windowless hotel conference room and instantly know how to shape the light. Not because you’ve shot in that exact room before, but because you understand how light behaves against surfaces and then how your camera and lens reacts to that light.
Eventually, the tool stops demanding your attention and starts serving your intent.
And I used to think that was the end of the story. I thought once you reached technical fluency, you had won the game. I really believe that, for a long time.
But there is a dark side to craft that not many people talk about.
So a couple years ago, I had this commercial shoot. It went well. And it was a technical shoot, complicated. A bunch of strobes, moving parts. It was a shoot that the 10 year younger version of me would have sweated about. I would have been nervous and anxious the whole time. But for me, during that shoot, I didn’t have any of that.
I didn’t even think about that fact till I got home, and I laid on my couch in my empty and quiet house, staring up a the ceiling. And in that moment, I remember thinking, that shoot was pretty fucking complicated. So many moving pieces. Complex lighting. Complex shots. And I’ll never forget it, I remember laying there thinking how I wasn’t anxious at all. How weird that was. What was that? Was that confidence? Had I arrived?
But then as I laid there, I remember asking myself another question, “So what?”
Really, I mean this was just a pretty normal shoot. Nothing that would impress anyone. Aspirational lifestyle whatever. Just good work I think.
Here is the thing, I spent so, so, so long thinking about and worrying about the technical parts, that when the technical parts of the craft finally got out of the way, it kinda left me kinda … empty. Maybe even kinda lost.
And I think that’s the quiet trap waiting for you at the top of technical execution.
Capacity answers how. It doesn't touch why.
You can spend ten years mastering craft, only to realize you’ve built a high-performance engine for a car you have no idea where to drive. Technical fluency can easily become a very comfortable, very expensive hiding place for photographers who are terrified of being vulnerable enough to say something real.
RESOLUTION
Looking back, I think that’s the mistake I made for a long time. I thought the ultimate goal of photography was simply to know more—more modifiers, more software tricks, more complex setups, more gear.
I don’t believe that anymore. I think the true purpose of craft is to make itself invisible. To become so second-nature that the technical quietly steps into the background where it belongs—not because it isn't important, but because it’s finally doing its job.
I said at the beginning of this episode that there is a frustrating gap between the photograph living in your imagination and the one that ends up on the back of your camera.
Craft is how you close that gap. One experiment, one mistake, one audited variable at a time.
Until one day, the photograph in your head and the photograph on your screen start looking surprisingly similar.
And when that happens, something strange takes place. For years, every creative problem had an obvious, technical answer: buy the lens, take the course, practice the lighting setup, keep putting in the reps.
Then you wake up and realize you can technically execute almost anything you can imagine. And instead of feeling finished… you feel a strange sense of vertigo. You realize you’re standing at the beginning of a much harder question.
The question stops being "How do I make this?"
It becomes "Why am I making it?"
That’s where we’re going next week. We’ve audited the gear. We’ve built the craft. Now I want to talk about the part that took me the longest to figure out, and maybe I am still figuring out. We’re talking about Voice.
Not style. Not branding. Not finding a profitable niche. Something much more personal than that.
What happens when the camera finally gets out of the way… and you’re left entirely alone with your own ideas? Or, if we’re being honest, a lack of ideas.
Until then… stay curious, stay courageous. And yeah… stay terrible.