Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.

It was a hazy, smoky day in Wyoming when we spent some time in the Grand Teton National Park. In September and October, western states’ wildfires would mar many of the images on our trip. We stopped at one viewpoint in the Grand Tetons where I saw a placard naming the peaks visible from that point. The second-highest peak in the range is Mount Owen at 12,933 feet (3,942 m). The mountain was visible from this viewpoint behind a couple of other peaks. Normally I would have used my 300mm zoom lens to get a closeup from my Nikon D500, but I wanted to text my daughter an image of Mount Owen so she could share it with our grandson, Owen.

About the photo: I used the zoom function of my Samsung S20U to capture a 108 MP image (12,000×9000 pixels). Then I used Snapseed on my phone to crop and edit to clean it up. The high pixel count allowed me a serious crop factor to focus on Mount Owen. It was clean enough to send to my grandson, but for sharing here, I took one more step and used the haze removal tool in Luminar 4. It was such a hazy day, and we were quite some distance from the peak, that tool did the best it could, but when I tried full correction of the tool, it made the image look unrealistic. I opted to back off on the control and leave some of the haze visible. All in all, given the conditions, the image turned out better than I expected. Someday we’ll have to visit the park when the air is clear.

John Steiner