Shoot Stock on Every Photo Walk: A Compositing Artist's Field Guide

Every composite I build starts with a problem: I don’t have the right piece. The sky is wrong, the ground texture is flat, or the background crowd is too recognizable to use without a release. I’ve spent real money licensing stock assets that were almost right, and I’ve lost hours trying to fix an image that was never going to work in the first place. What I needed wasn’t better compositing skills in those moments.