I was today years old when I learned that most of the reason my sunset photos looked fine — but never quite right — wasn’t the sunset. It was my phone doing exactly what I told it to do. And me not realizing I was the one giving it bad instructions.
A little background
I’ve always loved photography.
Long before phones had decent cameras, I traveled with an SLR — a Pentax that went with me to places like London and Paris. On my first major trip to Europe, I nearly got myself detained at Charles de Gaulle because I didn’t want to send my “once-in-a-lifetime trip” film through an X-ray machine.
That’s a long story (Note from Joe’s wife: Yah, a long story that includes airport police with guns). But the short version is: photography matters to me.
Over time, though, my phone became “good enough.” For a non-professional — especially someone taking photos to share online or on a blog — smartphone cameras have reached the point where carrying a dedicated camera no longer feels necessary.
But the desire for composition and expression never went away. I just tried to satisfy it the wrong way.
What my sunset photos used to look like
I chased the perfect moment.
The exact second the sun touched the horizon. The timing. The clouds. The luck.
If the photo didn’t work, I assumed I’d missed it.
There’s nothing wrong with these photos. They’re pleasant. They capture the scene. They look like sunsets.
They just don’t quite match what it felt like to be there.
That’s because my phone was doing what it’s designed to do — trying to make everything visible.
The thing I didn’t realize
What finally clicked — and this is the “I was this many years old when I learned this” moment — is that my phone wasn’t failing. It was helping. Just not in the way I wanted.
I was still thinking like a film photographer, waiting for the perfect shot, instead of telling a modern camera what mattered in the scene.
It turns out I didn’t need better timing — I needed to stop treating my phone like a disposable camera.
Yes, I asked AI
In a very 2026 moment, I asked ChatGPT what I was doing wrong.
Not to edit the photos for me. Not to “fix” them after the fact. Just to explain how my phone’s camera actually works.
The answer turned out to be almost embarrassingly simple.
When you tap the screen, your phone decides what matters. And I wasn’t tapping anything — so the phone was deciding what was important. The water, the ground, whatever was in front of me… that’s what the phone kept trying to brighten. And every time, the sunset got a little washed out.
The fix was to tap on the sky and drag the exposure down until the colors matched what I actually saw.
That was it.
After: with the correct settings
Once I stopped letting my phone decide what was important — and told it to expose for the sky instead — everything changed.
Same phone. Same sunsets. No filters. No heavy editing.
Just intention.
The colors were always there.
I just had to stop trying to save the shadows and let the sunset be the star.
The bigger takeaway
This isn’t really about sunsets. It’s about how most of us don’t actually know what our phones are capable of — not because the features are hidden, but because no one ever really explains how to use them with intent.
We point.
We tap.
We hope.
And when the photo doesn’t match what we saw, we shrug.
Sometimes, all it takes is one small shift — or one good explanation — to realize you already had the tool you needed… even if it’s a computer that told you how to use your phone to capture nature’s miracles.
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