Each March, thousands of Sandhill cranes on their annual spring migration stop at the Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge a few miles south of Monte Vista, Colorado to feed for a few days before continuing on with their journey. Arriving at the refuge before dawn and napping in my truck, just as the first faint light in the eastern sky was starting to show, I heard the “gar-oo-oo gar-oo-oo” chortling calls of the cranes and started seeing very faint dark shapes moving across the sky. When there was barely enough light in the eastern sky to make even a long exposure, I nevertheless set up my Nikon D100 with Sigma 500mm lens on the tripod and tried a few shots. I do not recall the manual exposure I used, but it was as wide open on my lens(f/4.5) and as slow as I felt I could go to stop motion (around 1/125th second) at probably ISO 400. This exposure gave me very underexposed, dark images with only faint color in the sky, and the spacing and wing positions of these three birds was pure luck and not noticed until editing my photos. A little work using Levels in Photoshop brought out this glorious sunrise color. This image was also cropped into a panoramic composition.