Costa Rica

A dream photo trip to Costa Rica to shoot birds, snakes, frogs, crocodiles resulted in 20,000 frames to be edited. This took a week using OMWorkspace to cull that number down to 200 images for consideration to be edited.

What started as an off-hand comment from one of our mentor photographers in the Oakville Camera Club that his dream photo trip to Costa Rica was likely to be cancelled because they couldn’t find one more photographer resulted in a quick call to Marion (who was already booked for a trip to Morocco at the same time) had me signed up for 10 days in paradise.

That was the good news. The bad news was I needed a $3,000 150-600 (300 to 1,200mm in 35 mm terms) Olympus zoom.

Thankfully the big zoom was essential and highly recommended for anyone shooting Olympus. For other cameras like Nikon or Canon similar long zooms (and at least a 100-400mm) is highly recommended.

And while many of the places we stayed (remote, lovely but modest lodges with cabins and great meals and very helpful and friendly staff) had decks off the main dinning room areas where hummingbirds by the hundreds could be shot with a cell phone longer lenses are necessary when shooting in the jungles.

One of the highlights was a river adventure cruise in a simple long boat that could handle the currents and shallows of the deep country river system.

I’ll do a more technical post later about what to take and what to leave home when it comes to doing a photo shoot in Costa Rica. More images are available on my gallery: https://peterwest.smugmug.com/Costa-Rica-2025