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The Terrible Photographer is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative humans trying to stay honest in a world that rewards pretending
June 6, 1944. Omaha Beach. 6:30 AM.
June 6. Omaha Beach. 0630 hours.
The water isn’t just cold. It’s an insult. It’s the kind of freezing that shuts down your organs before you even register the temperature. The English Channel in June is a cruel joke. The air smells like a garage fire mixed with a slaughterhouse. Diesel smoke. Cordite. The perfume of the end of the world.
Endre Friedmann—the Hungarian gambler better known as Robert Capa—is in a landing barge with two thousand other poor bastards. They left the Samuel Chase at 4:00 AM. They dropped like stones into a rough sea, and immediately started vomiting into the little paper bags the Army had thoughtfully provided. The Army thinks of everything, except how to keep you alive.
Capa has two Contax cameras wrapped in oilskin tucked into his jacket. He has a farewell letter to his family folded in his pocket. He has a will he didn't want to write. He isn't a soldier. He’s a professional witness. He is there to see the things the rest of the civilized world will spend the next fifty years trying to forget.
The ramp drops. The meat grinder starts turning. Everyone jumps into waist-deep water. And the German machine guns open up.
Capa would later write that the bullets were "tearing holes in the water." He scrambles for a steel hedgehog—one of Hitler's little "surrealistic designs," as he called them. For a few minutes, it’s just him, a dead soldier bobbing up and down next to hom, and the steel of the hedgehog shielding him from german bullets.. The water is gray. The sky is gray. The only color in the world is the muzzle flashes and the blood.
But Capa does the job. He keeps shooting. His hands are shaking—not from the cold, but from the sheer, animal terror of it. He crawls on his stomach, past the floating bodies, repeating a mantra from the Spanish Civil War: "Es una cosa muy seria. Es una cosa muy seria." This is a very serious business.
He shoots four rolls. 106 frames. The only visual record of the first wave of the invasion. He survives. He gets the film back to London. And then, the punchline. A darkroom kid at Life magazine—probably overworked, probably terrified of the deadline—turns the heat in the drying cabinet up too high. The emulsion melts. The images slide right off the celluloid. Out of 106 frames, only eleven survive. And they look like hell. They are grainy. They are blurry. The contrast is blown out. Technically speaking, they are garbage.
When Life runs them, they print a caption apologizing for the quality. They say the images are "slightly out of focus" because of the photographer's shaking hands. But here is the irony. If you look at those photos today—the "Magnificent Eleven"—you don't see the failure. You feel the vibration. You feel the panic. A sharp photo would have been bullshit. It would have looked like a movie set. Like Spielberg shot D-Day with a crane and a fog machine. Which is ironic because it was these images that that that he based the look on Saving Private Ryan. The noise, the grain, the absolute destruction of the image... it was the only way to tell the story of the destruction of the world.
(THEME MUSIC SWELLS)
(THE HANDSHAKE)
PATRICK: My name is Patrick Fore. This is The Terrible Photographer.
We've made it to Episode 38. I'm calling it "Noise in the Shadows."
Today we're talking about Fear. and Physics and Truth.
Now, if you were paying attention, you noticed that I released a bonus episode on Thursday called ‘Good Vs. Bad’ . It’s part of a new midweek episode series I’m doing called, ‘Basics, Deconstructed’. It’s where we take the foundational ideas, concepts, rules of photography, take them a part, and examine them through a philosophical lens. I will say, I’m not sure the cadence of these things, they will drop as I have time. It’s hard enough to get regular episodes out, let alone two, but hey, i’m an over achiever.
I'm glad you're here. If this is your first time listening—welcome to the mess. These episodes are in no particular order, so feel free to jump around. And as always, you can email me anytime—questions, thoughts, hate mail, existential spirals. I respond to everything. Email's in the show notes.
(MUSIC FADES OUT)
(THE PHYSICS)
So, before we get too far into this, I need to get everyone up to speed on the physics. At the risk of annoying my experienced photographer listeners—I know you know this. Bear with me. But if you're not a photographer—if you're a designer, a writer, a creative human who just happens to listen because we talk about more than cameras—you need to understand this or the rest of the story doesn't make sense.
A photograph is just light hitting a sensor. That's it. Too little light, your image is black. Too much, it's blown out white. Everything is about getting the right amount of light to create a visible image. Photographers have three controls to do this. And like everything in life, it’s about balance. If you’ve ever driven a manual transmission, you know that to get the car moving, you need the right balance of clutch versus gas. Too much clutch? You don't move. Too much gas? You stall out. A camera works the same way.
These three controls are called the Exposure Triangle. And these three controls are in a hostage negotiation with each other. You need them to be in harmony to get the shot.
First, at the top of the triangle: Shutter Speed. This is Time. How long the curtain is open. If you want to freeze a hummingbird's wings, you need a fast shutter. The curtain is only open for a blink. But because it’s only a blink, you’re letting in very little light. So your image goes dark.
Which brings us to the second point: Aperture. This is the Iris. It works exactly like your eye. Walk into a dark room? Your pupil opens wide to let light in. Walk outside at noon? It shrinks to a pinprick to protect the retina. A camera lens does the same thing. To get more light for that hummingbird, you open the aperture wide. But here is the trade: When you open the iris, you lose focus depth. If you open it too much, the hummingbird’s beak is sharp, but its wings are a blur. What you gain in light, you lose in focus.
Which brings us to the third point: ISO. This is the Gain. Think of this like the volume knob on a pair of cheap speakers. If you don't have enough light (the music is too quiet), you can just crank the ISO. You turn up the volume. And it works. The image gets brighter. But just like those cheap speakers, when you crank the volume to max, you get distortion. Static. Hiss. In photography, that hiss is called Noise. So, if you use ISO to save the shot, you are going to introduce grain into the image.
And here is the point. You cannot have it all. Fast shutter? You lose light. Deep focus? You lose light. Clean image? You lose speed. Someone has to lose. In a controlled environment—a studio with big strobes—you can cheat the physics. You can have it all. But in the real world? When the light is dying and the hummingbird is gone? That's when it becomes a hostage situation. That's when you have to choose what you're willing to kill to get the shot.
Which leads me to something called "Denoise." And why I fucking hate it.
Warning: This might be a hot take.
There are features in every photo software now that "reduce noise" for you. One click, and it scrubs the grain away. And I have to tell you... I hate it. I think I’ve used it once in my entire career, and I regretted it immediately. Because "Denoise" exists for two reasons: One: People don't understand exposure, so they shoot badly and try to fix it later. Or Two—and this is the dangerous one—they equate "Noise" with "Bad."
We are so terrified of imperfection that we have built software to scrub it out. And here is the irony: In an effort to remove the grain, we are stripping the texture, the life, and the soul out of the image. We are choosing "Plastic" over "Real."
And I think that is a tragedy. Stay with me.
(THE CULTURAL CLEAN)
PATRICK: We do this everywhere now. We have trained ourselves—and our machines—to denoise the human experience.
Open Instagram. Scroll through it. It acts like a visual sedative, doesn't it? Endless streams of coffee cups on marble. Succulents in white pots. Skin so retouched the human being underneath has been erased. And I'm not better. I posted a photo two weeks ago that I color-graded for 45 minutes because I knew it would perform. Smooth. Warm. Safe. 300 likes. Zero people actually feeling anything. Because I wanted the dopamine more than I wanted the truth.
But here is the darker part. It’s not just us. The tools are conspiring to do this. Pull out your iPhone. Take a picture of a sunset. The phone isn't capturing reality. It’s actively rejecting it. Apple has spent billions of dollars on R&D, focus groups, and A/B testing to figure out exactly what stimulates the lizard brain of the average consumer. And the data came back: We like sugar. We like high contrast. We like oversaturated blues. We like bright shadows. So when you hit that shutter button, the phone takes twelve exposures in a microsecond. It uses AI to stitch them together. It lifts the shadows so nothing is hidden. It pulls down the highlights so nothing is blown out. It sharpens the edges. It pumps the color. It creates a "computational lie." It gives you the image that focus groups said they wanted, not the image that was actually there. It is the visual equivalent of MSG. It tastes good immediately, but it has no nutritional value.
And it’s not just phones. Look at movies. Go watch The Godfather. Blade Runner. Heat. Those movies were shot on film. Film has limits. The cinematographers—people like Gordon Willis—had to make choices. They had to let the shadows go pitch black. They had to let the windows blow out. The "mistakes" were the style. The darkness was the point. You couldn't see Marlon Brando’s eyes, and that is exactly why he was terrifying.
Now? Look at a modern blockbuster. They are shooting on ARRI Alexa digital sensors with 14, 15 stops of dynamic range. They capture everything. They squeeze every ounce of data out of the shadows and the highlights. And because the studio executives are terrified of the audience missing something, they light everything. They grade everything to be flat, visible, and safe. We have traded atmosphere for information. We don't want mystery anymore; we want content. Everything is lit. Everything is visible. Technically perfect. And emotionally dead.
Because we have trained ourselves to believe that "fixing" the image is the same as making it better. We think that if we just remove enough noise, and lift enough shadows, we’ll finally have a perfect picture. But we don't. We just have a really clean picture of nothing.
And I wish I could say I’m above it. I wish I could tell you I’m the brave artist fighting for the shadows. But I’m not. I’ve been domesticated just like everyone else.
Which kills me you know?... because I used to be better at this.
When we lived in the Northwest—Bellingham Washington—my Canon 5D Mark III and 50mm 1.2 never left my side. I took it everywhere. To the grocery store. To shitty diners. On walks in the rain.
I wasn't trying to make portfolio pieces. I wasn't thinking about whether the light was good. I just... saw things. And shot them.
Badly lit diners with yellow fluorescent tubes. Rainy streets with blown-out highlights. Lucy as a toddler covered in mud in terrible light.
Those photos are sometimes grainy. They're imperfect. The exposure is wrong half the time.
And they're the only photos I can't stop looking at.
I don't shoot like that anymore.
Now, when I take out my camera, it's strategic. It's planned. It's curated. "Let's go to La Jolla and shoot some cool portraits at the beach with Loki." Like a fucking lifestyle campaign.
I've stopped documenting my life. I'm art directing it.
(THE CONFESSION - PART 2: LUCY)
Which makes me think of a moment a years ago. Lucy is in the living room. She’s younger, maybe four or five. It’s a totally unscripted, natural moment. She’s building this precarious tower out of wooden blocks. She’s focused. She’s humming to herself. She is completely lost in her own world. But the light... the light was a disaster. It was noon. Hard sun blasting through the sliding glass door. Hotspots blowing out the floor. Deep, crushed shadows where she was sitting in the corner of the living room. Mixed color temperatures—blue daylight clashing with the orange tungsten of the lamps. Technically? It was a nightmare. But emotionally? She was alive in it. Maybe even the chaos of the light matched the chaos of the play.
And I thought, "I need to remember this." So I grabbed my camera. Much newer, much more expensive camera and I brought it to my eye.
And then—before I could even stop myself—the Director took over. The lizard brain kicked in. I lowered the camera and said, "Hey Lucy, can we move your block over here by the window?”
I moved her. I moved her out of the shadows. I moved her out of the moment. I moved her into the soft, directional, window light because I knew it would wrap around her face perfectly. And being a good kid, she did it. She moved her blocks over. She started to build again looked up at me and gave me that smile—you know the one. The "Dad has a camera" smile. Click.
Totally different scene. Same subject, same story, better light, no soul.
The photo is fine. It’s a nice photo. The exposure is good. The skin tone is good.
If I sent it to my parents they would love it. If I posted it on Facebook, everyone would like it.
But the moment wasn't by the window. The moment was in the dark, with the blocks. I didn't capture the memory. I killed it. I literally stopped her life to fake a new one that looked better on a histogram and an image I think would be more impressive to people. I wasn’t thinking about Lucy or the story or the moment. I was being selfish, I was creating something dishonest.
And to be honest,I have a hard time turning that off. I caught myself doing it again two days later. We were at the park. She was running on the grass, the sun was directly at her. I wanted her more backlit to catch the tree lined background behind. So I stopped the moment and had her turn around so the background and her silhouette would be perfect.
Why? Because the light is better? Sure it was, It was a better photo, but again, I stopped something real to art direct a moment. I was art directing her childhood right into the ground.
Here is the sick joke of it all. I didn't fail that moment with Lucy because I’m a bad photographer. I failed because I’m a good one. The problem isn't that I don't understand light. The problem is that I know too much. I am suffering from an overdose of education.
I have been trained so thoroughly—by clients, by creative directors, by the algorithm—that I can't turn it off. I can't un-see the math. I can't look at a sunset without seeing a histogram. I can't look at my daughter playing in the shadows without calculating the dynamic range. I can't just be there. The market has colonized my vision.
And it's not just me. It's you, too. It’s the landscape photographer who stares at a majestic mountain and feels disappointed because the clouds aren't "epic" enough for the algorithm. It’s the wedding photographer who misses the tear running down the groom’s cheek because she was too busy checking her rim light. It’s the street photographer who deletes a moment of pure humanity because there was motion blur. We have this incredible tool.
This machine that was designed to capture the human experience in all its messy, grainy, imperfect truth. And we are terrified to actually use it. Not because we don't know how. But because we have been rewarded for "perfect" for so long that we have forgotten what "honest" looks like.
(THE ENEMY)
So let's name the enemy.
And let's be clear about what it is. The enemy isn't grain. It's not noise. It's not the fact that your hand shook or the focus missed. The enemy is competence. It is the slow, creeping rot of expertise. It’s that thing that happens when you get good enough to know better, and you stop being dangerous. You stop taking risks because you know the math. You’ve memorized the formula for "safe." It is the professionalization of the human soul.
We are rewiring our brains to sand the edges off of everything. We are sterilizing our own experiences in real-time. We see a moment—a messy, beautiful, chaotic moment—and immediately, instinctively, we reach for the bleach. We correct the color.
We fix the exposure. We wipe away the grime until there’s nothing left but a clean, sterile, palatable product. I move my daughter to the window. I pose her. I curate the frame.
Why? Because I’ve been infected by the market. I’m not looking at my child anymore; I’m looking at a composition. I’m not making a memory; I’m creating an asset. I am strip-mining my own life for content. And the worst part? I don't know how to stop. The calculator is running in the background, twenty-four hours a day, turning every shadow into a problem and every beam of light into a commodity. We have become excellent technicians. And we are boring as hell.
(THE RESOLUTION)
PATRICK: Here is the secret about grain: An audience will forgive grain. They will never, ever forgive blur.
And here is why: Grain is texture. It’s grit. It is the visual friction of reality rubbing up against the sensor. When you look at Capa’s photos, they are grainy as hell. They look like they were developed in dirty water. And you don't care. In fact, you believe them more because of it. The grain tells you that the photographer was struggling. That the light was dying. That the situation was hostile. Grain is proof of life. It is proof that someone reached into the chaos, grabbed a handful of it, and dragged it back to show you. It feels like a memory.
But blur? Blur is the visual signature of hesitation. Blur says, "I wasn't sure." Blur says, "I tried to save the exposure instead of saving the moment." Blur is what happens when you are too polite to make a choice. You didn't want the grain, but you didn't have the light, so you sat in the middle. You hedged your bets. And you got nothing.
And when I look at how I’m shooting now? I’m blurring my own life. I’m moving my daughter to the window. I’m waiting for the "golden hour." I’m only taking the camera out when the conditions are sanitized and safe. I am hedging my bets against my own memories. I’m treating every moment like it needs to be optimized before it’s worth capturing. Like my life isn't good enough to be photographed until I’ve cleaned it up first.
People don't remember clean. Nobody recounts the story of the time the lighting was adequate. They remember brave. They remember the texture. They remember the feeling of being there.
But I don't know how to be brave anymore. Not with my own life. Not when the stakes are this low and the reward is just... living. Being present. Seeing the mess and loving it anyway. I got worse as I got better. And I don't know if I can get back.
(THE LIGHT LEAK)
I don't have an answer for you. I don't have a distinct "three-step plan" to un-break your brain. I don't know how to uncage myself. I don't know how to see like I used to. I don't know how to stop the calculator that runs in the back of my head every time the sun hits a wall.
But I know this: The photos I love—the ones that actually matter to me, the ones I would save in a fire—are the ones from before. Before I got good. Before I knew the rules. When I just pointed the camera at stuff because it looked interesting and I didn't give a damn about the histogram. Those photos are grainy. They're badly lit. They're technically "incorrect." And they are the only ones I can't stop looking at.
So maybe that's the trade. Maybe it's not Shutter Speed for ISO. Maybe it's not Aperture for Depth. Maybe the trade is Competence for Honesty. Expertise for Presence. The ability to make a perfect image traded for the ability to see at all.
And to be honest with you... I don't know if I can make that trade. Because I've spent too long on this side. I've optimized myself into a corner. I have polished this skill until there is no friction left. I have professionalized the joy right out of it.
But I miss it. I miss carrying my camera for no reason. I miss bad light. I miss not knowing if the shot worked until I got home and opened the files. I miss the surprise. I miss the noise.
So here's what I'm going to try. It’s small, but it’s all I’ve got. Next time Lucy is doing something—anything—I'm going to shoot it where she is. In the shitty light. In the yellow wash of the kitchen. In the backlit chaos of the living room. I'm not going to move her. I'm not going to pose her. I'm not going to "fix" it. I'm just going to crank the ISO. I’m going to let the grain eat the shadows. I’m going to let the image fall apart. And I'm going to see what happens.
Because at the end of the day, I'd rather have a messy photo of a real life than a perfect photo of a fake one.
Stop trying to get a perfect exposure. The light is never perfect. Make the trade. Crank the ISO. And whatever you do—don't blur.
Stay curious. Stay courageous. And yeah... stay terrible.