I can no longer recognize reality

    Whatever you do, NEVER get sucked into playing with panorama photography software. (What? What did you think I was talking about? Oh, well I'm not so hot at recognizing other forms of reality either. But that's not what I'm talking about today.) My phone, as I may have mentioned here and there, has a surprisingly sophisticated panorama function. However, it requires one to stand very still for a few seconds several times and requires smooth panning skills that I have only imperfectly mastered. More to the point, the location where I most want to shoot panoramas, Congaree National Park, is overrun (or flown) by astonishing numbers of mosquitoes. Personally, my dedication to panoramic photography does not run to risking exsanguination.
    Thus, today I brought along the Nikon, which I can point and shoot with a bit of preliminary preparation. I can't quite sneer at the mosquitoes, but they don't get too big a bite out of me. I shot four pictures which I thought would make a panorama. Back home, I fed them into the panorama software which came with the Nikon, but no go. The four pictures came out as a combination of two. I was disappointed but saved the result, since it was still quite cool looking. I then started combining sets of two adjacent pictures out of the four. One set came out very well, but another combination was so ridiculous it clued me that the software isn't all that great at finding where pictures overlap.
    The software took the left end of the left-hand picture and tacked it onto the right end of the right-hand picture. In other words, it got everything completely wrong. This also tipped me that my first result was probably not as good as I had thought. So I checked the first saved panorama against the second one. In both, the right-hand portion of the panorama was identical. But the left-hand section was different. Apparently the first panorama was a mashup of the very left-most picture with the very right-most, while the second one was an actual reflection of reality, a panorama composed of the third and fourth pictures, i.e. the two to the right. I really couldn't tell by looking at them which was real. It was more than a little trippy. Needless to say, I like the imaginary panorama better.