What Scott Kelby and Erik Kuna's Live Edits Taught Me About Trusting the Problem First

I keep a folder on my desktop called “failures.” Once a month I open it, scroll through the wreckage, and try to figure out what I was thinking. Last month I landed on a composite I made two years ago where the background sky and the foreground subject had completely different noise signatures. The sky was butter-smooth from a long exposure. The subject was grainy at ISO 1600. I tried to blur them into agreement and made both worse.