Sunrise Photo and Camera Comparisons

Remember when I talked about trying to take photos of the same sunset (or sunrise!) on different camera settings? If you have any Facebook friends in the Anchorage area, you probably already know that we had a particularly lovely sunrise yesterday morning (or at least it seemed that way, can't say I've seen a proper sunrise in a while - between all the stormy weather and the fact that my office is on the north side of the building). But, I had the chance to do some experimenting this morning from home! Except I used two cameras on auto rather than the same camera on different settings. And I didn't realize I was doing an experiment at the time - I just picked the DSLR camera because I could, and let's face it, it's also the best, and I used my iPhone 5 because it's the only camera I own from which I can post photos directly to Facebook. Because what else matters, really?

I didn't actually post directly to Facebook from my phone because I though it was such a lovely scene that it deserved the justice of 12 megapixels (hahahaha - I know, you're thinking "my Windows phone has more megapixels than that...like 4 times more!" Whatever, it's the optics and the lens (and the photographer) that matter more than the megapixels once you get to a certain threshold, or at least that's what I'll keep telling myself).

So here they are, stitched and edited in Windows Live Photo Gallery (I know, I know, you're laughing again,  I don't have Photoshop, but it just goes to show, there are inexpensive ways to waste spend time on photography). I tried to edit these so they looked the closest to what the colors looked like in real life. But that's trick business because do you remember it a certain way because that's how it was or because that's how it's now burned into your memory from the photos?

Here is the best photo with the DSLR (four images stitched together, no editing on the colors/exposure):

Here is the same image with "auto adjust" in my fancy program (I tend to think this one was the closest to reality):

This one is my iPhone panorama with no editing (colors are much warmer than the DSLR photos):

Here is the iPhone image with auto adjust in Windows again:

And since that one seemed a little too blue, I manually adjusted the colors, exposure, and shadows and came up with what I thought was closer to the scene in real life:

I still think the closest likeness is probably the DSLR image with auto adjust. But like I said, now I'm not so sure what it looked like in real life. And, colors and lighting change so quickly during a sunrise and sunset that each photo won't necessarily look like the ones before and after. What do you think?