Making reality better

    I figured out what the deal is with phone pictures these days, i.e., yesterday's post. It was so blindingly obvious that I was blinded, of course. What else? The deal is that the smart phones have better screens than laptops, or at least the cheap smart phone I bought has a better (higher resolution, I presume) screen than the cheap laptop I bought. When I looked at the Nikon pic on the laptop and the phone pic on the phone, the latter looked much better. When I copied the latter to the laptop and looked at both of them on the laptop, the Nikon magically looked better. Ditto when looking at my own blog post with both pics on the phone.
    This explains why we all think we're great photographers when shooting with our phone cameras. I was always posting pictures on Facebook and feeling annoyed that they didn't look as good, thinking that Facebook was sucking away my color palette. The fact that they looked fine via Facebook on the phone but less fine via the laptop escaped me totally. Sharp as a tack, I am.
    So, this leads us to a world where our perceptions are informed by the little computers we carry around in our pockets that make our surroundings look more beautiful than they really are, and then we wake up to the illusion when we see a more accurate reflection. Sounds like a fairy tale, or beer goggles. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I like the really pretty pictures, but then I'm mad when they turn out to be less pretty than I think. I guess I could try to adjust the display on the phone to dial down the tint a bit. But I'm not sure either the I or the phone is that smart.