During a recent road trip, I spent a day and a half at the Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico.  By far, it is one of the best places I have photographed birds.

A day and a half usually means one dawn session, one dusk session and another dawn session the following day.  No photography is done in the middle of the day, between dawn and dusk.

When I visit a place for the first time ever, I rarely make any good photographs.  I am so unfamiliar with the place that most of my mental energy is dissipated in just figuring out the roads or the points to stop at, or simply getting an overview of the place.  Consequently, during my very first dawn session, I made some frames, but no keepers.

In my second visit, the dusk session of day 1, I made this photograph.  I discovered the location from which I could get close to the sandhill cranes.  However, in this session, the whole landscape was more important to me, than the birds themselves,. The post sunset pink in the sky and its reflection in the water, brackets the birds.  Furthermore, the bluish cast of the distant hills nicely complements the bluish gray on the birds themselves.

This is my first ever pano photograph made with my 200-500mm lens at the 500mm end.  Several vertical frames were shot overlapping each other and this panoramic frame was stitched together in Lightroom.  The final file is 85 megapixels, suitable for a large fine art print.

Is this a landscape photograph or wildlife photograph?  Email me at info@pixgaga.com on your thoughts.