The Colors of Costa Rica (and a really tough shot)!

After leading many photo tours to Costa Rica, people often ask me if I ever get tired of it and the answer is a definitive "No!" I remind them that every trip has different people who I enjoy meeting, offers up new experiences, and provides new sightings of wildlife. This last trip started with a really big storm, and even though heavy rain is the norm down on the Osa Peninsula, the high winds downed a lot of trees. Luckily that first day was the only bad day we had, and everything else was smooth sailing. 

As I looked back at the photos from this trip, I thought about the beautiful colors that we see in the rain forest and thought that this would make for a nice blog post.

Many times I save my favorite photo for the end of the blog post, but this time I am going to lead with it. 

While driving around looking for wildlife, we came across a couple of Scarlet macaw that were nested in a tree hole. We were all trying to get nice photos of them when they both flew off and headed to our left. Without changing any camera settings, and knowing that my shutter speed would be really slow, I fired off 5 shots hoping to get a motion pan of the birds flying. I was using the Canon R5 Mark II camera with the RF 100-500mm lens at 428mm.  My ISO was set to 1250, aperture at f/6.3 and this gave me a shutter speed of 1/30 of a second. Even though I was shooting handheld, I steadied myself and hoped for the best. This is one of my favorite photos from the trip, and one of the hardest photos I have taken in a really long time. I love the motion and the colors, and knowing the difficulty of getting this with the birds faces pretty sharp.

Sure...we can capture their color without the motion, but I love the challenge of the first shot.

When exiting the vehicle at the Chocolate tour, one my guests looked at a nearby leaf and saw this beautiful butterfly. What awesome colors in the wings.

This Trogon was showing off his colors, especially against the complimenting green leaves. I posted this image in a previous blog, but found that the exposure needed to be brightened a bit. So...the repost.

And of course, I can't leave out the colorful Red-eyed tree frogs, since they are so awesome.

We saw these Seedeaters in the tall grasses by a river and had fun capturing images of them. A small splash of color amongst the green foliage.

Speaking of the foliage, it is not just the wildlife which offer colorful images. We are surrounded by abundant color on this trip.

I saw this white butterfly perched on this colorful flower and liked the scene. The simplicity of the white wings worked well against the color which surrounded the insect. 

While cruising down the Sierpe River, I saw these pretty flowers protruding over the water and thought it would make for a pretty photo.

We almost always have a free day in the rain forest towards the end of the trip. I usually catch up on work, relax at the pool, and walk the property looking for cool things to photograph. I saw this phosphorescent fly on a flower, zoomed the long lens to 500mm and captured the amazing colors of this little bug. As I mentioned, there is color everywhere, from the biggest subject to the smallest insects. 

If you want to join me in Costa Rica next year, I have added 3 new trips to 2026. Check out the dates HERE.

 

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• Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!

• Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos, Alaska and more.

• You can purchase Jeff Cable Photography images from my new fine art site at: https://fineart.jeffcable.com/

• If you are interested in purchasing ANY equipment, please click here to go to B&H Photo, as I get a referral from them if you enter this way. It does not change the cost to you in any way, but it helps me keep this blog up and running.
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More images from our "close-up" day in the rain forest of Costa Rica!

I used to call this day our "macro day" in the rain forest but now with long lenses that can focus so close to subjects, many of my guests (and myself) like to use our long lenses to get up close and personal with the tiny subjects in the rain forest. I used both my Canon R5 Mark II with the RF 100mm macro lens and my Canon R1 with the RF 100-500mm lens.

This part of the trip is always a favorite for my guests, and they are always excited to capture images of these awesome reptiles.

The red-eyed tree frog is my favorite, and the most popular with my group. They are just so photographic with their bright red eyes.

I like to capture photos of them while they are on the move. I find that their extended legs add to the photo and make them much more interesting than just a frog sitting in one spot.

As this frog moved from one flower to another, I started firing off shots. I saw the shadow being cast on the second flower and loved that!

Here is a photo of a blue-eyed human and a red-eyed tree frog. 😀 Thanks to Patty (one of my guests) for taking this photo.

We start with the red-eyed tree frogs and then move to the Dart frogs which are even smaller. These frogs are about one inch in size and they move fast!

Eduardo, who runs the reptile area that we visit, went out and found a wide variety of frogs for us to photograph...

...from the smallest to the really big ones.

He also found us an Eyelash viper to photograph (from a distance since they are poisonous).

After we were done photographing all the reptiles, we sat down for a group lunch. After lunch I gave everyone time to photograph other fun things in the area. I chased hummingbirds, trying to get some nice photos of these ultra-fast birds.

I love the colors of this Sapphire-throated hummingbird.

Even more images to come in the next blog!

AND...I just opened up new photo tours to Costa Rica for 2026! Check them out HERE.

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• Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!

• Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos, Alaska and more.

• You can purchase Jeff Cable Photography images from my new fine art site at: https://fineart.jeffcable.com/

• If you are interested in purchasing ANY equipment, please click here to go to B&H Photo, as I get a referral from them if you enter this way. It does not change the cost to you in any way, but it helps me keep this blog up and running.
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Some of the monkeys, sloths and birds from the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica

I pushed a blog post after our first full day of this photo tour and then we were going so fast and furious that I never had a chance to share more images from this amazing place. We had a TON of wind and rain on the day we landed and then had great weather ever since. And as usual, we have seen so much wildlife!

We watched as some White-faced capuchin monkeys jumped from one tree to another. 

We also came across some Scarlet macaw nesting in a tree. 

We were driving by a river when we saw these birds flying around an open field. I used the subject detection of the Canon R1 (with the RF 100-500mm lens) to lock in on this little one as he flew right at us.

We had some great sightings of sloths on this trip, seeing both two-toed sloth and three-toed sloth many times. 

This three-toed sloth was in a perfect position for photography...

...and then I set up my Benro travel tripod and shot some video with the Canon R1. I posted a 30 second clip of this to show you how they eat and how they move. You can click the image above or click this link to see the movement. And yes, they move pretty slow. 

This was an 8 month old sloth who came down really slow.

In the sloth area, they also have beautiful birds and flowers. I caught this hummingbird gathering some nectar. 

I got much closer to this Red-lored amazon (with a much better background).

While walking around the resort property, I found this pack of Squirrel monkeys that were passing through.

It was awesome to see so many youngsters!

As they headed towards my building, I went up to the roof to see if I could get a photo at their eye level or looking down on them. I caught this one monkey lounging on a branch.

For the first time ever, we found a tree with at least forty Howler monkeys. They hung around forever and we all had a blast capturing images of these awesome monkeys.

I saw this youngster hanging from a tree and loved the pose.

Stay tuned for more photos from the rain forest of Costa Rica!

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• Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!

• Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos, Alaska and more.

• You can purchase Jeff Cable Photography images from my new fine art site at: https://fineart.jeffcable.com/

• If you are interested in purchasing ANY equipment, please click here to go to B&H Photo, as I get a referral from them if you enter this way. It does not change the cost to you in any way, but it helps me keep this blog up and running.
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This is what we saw on OUR FIRST DAY in Costa Rica today!

This was our first full day in the rain forest of Costa Rica and my guides and I took my guests out for a day of photography, and it turned out to be a great one! We saw all four species of monkeys and so much more. Check out what we captured just today!

Our morning started with a siting of a Roadside hawk here on the resort property. I took all of these photos with the Canon R1 camera with the Canon RF 100-500mm lens.

After a short drive we came across some adult Howler monkeys. Myself and many of my guests caught this monkey yawning high up in a tree. He looks fierce, but I think he was just tired.

For the first time in 15 trips down here, we spotted and got great shots of a Slaty-tailed trogon. 

During the late morning we spotted a group of Spider monkeys with their babies.

The babies are the cutest!

Later we caught another group of Spider monkeys grabbing some nearby fruit for a snack.

It is not often that we see Anteaters, but we saw one today, and this one was not afraid of us at all.

We had ample chances to photograph this Anteater as it walked around, climbed trees...

...and foraged for some food. 

When we got back to the resort this afternoon, we were ready to pack it in for the day when one of the guides spotted this Two-toed sloth right by our rooms. I showed everyone how we could use the nearby leaves as a frame for the sloth. What a way to end a great day!

And tomorrow we are doing macro photography with the Red-eyed tree frogs and more. So much fun!

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• Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!

• Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos, Alaska and more.

• You can purchase Jeff Cable Photography images from my new fine art site at: https://fineart.jeffcable.com/

• If you are interested in purchasing ANY equipment, please click here to go to B&H Photo, as I get a referral from them if you enter this way. It does not change the cost to you in any way, but it helps me keep this blog up and running.
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Backing up 65GB of images to my NAS drive from a different country!

One of the most challenging things I deal with is the secure storage of my images. Well...I call them my images, but they are also the images for my clients, and I hate having them in only one place. This keeps me up at night.

In the past week I was crazy busy with photo shoots for a government client, another institution, and 2 personal events. After all of this, I had just enough time to get all 10,000 images onto my MacBook Pro before heading to the airport on Sunday morning. Just in case something happened to my laptop in transport, I duplicated all those RAW files onto a SSD back in California before heading out.

I then spent the 9 hours of travel going through all the images and purging the duplicates and rejects, and ranking the good ones. I renamed all the files, retouched my favorites and got each gallery ready to post to my clients. I posted one event from the airport in Houston and the remainder from here in Costa Rica.

BUT at this point I had all the curated images only on my laptop and that makes me nervous. In the past, I would back them up on one of my Crucial 4TB SSDs and keep that SSD in a different bag from my laptop as I traveled, but was not ideal. I also tried uploading to my NAS drive directly through the web app but every time there was a disconnect from the Internet, or I had to close my laptop to move it, the synch would have to start over and that was impossible.

A couple of months ago I was watching an online presentation from QNAP and they mentioned something about Dropbox integration and this peaked my interest. I was thinking "Can I create a Dropbox folder and have it automatically uploaded to my QNAP 8-Bay NAS drives back in California?"

I reached out to the support people at QNAP and they were nice enough to help me set this up and, even though I am jumping ahead of things, it works amazing!! 

Using the Hybrid Backup Sync application from QNAP, I was able to create a link to my Dropbox account.

I then told the HBS app which folder to monitor.

Before leaving for this trip, I created a test folder with a handful of images to see if it worked, and within seconds of me uploading the files to my Dropbox folder, they were on the NAS drive. When landing here in Costa Rica, I took the two folders (with approximately 30GB of images each) and moved them the "Upload to QNAP Server" Dropbox folder I had created.

I let the computer run all night while I attempted to catch up on some much needed sleep. When I woke up in the morning, I saw that there were only a few more files remaining to upload to Dropbox. After a quick shower I checked again and the process was complete.

At this point, I was happy to have them in the cloud but wanted to check and see if they really had made it to my NAS drive. I used the MyQNAPCloud web link to log into my server from this remote location.

I was happy to see that both of the new folders had transferred over..

I then opened the folders to make sure that the synch had happened correctly and that everything is in place, and as expected, all 65GB of images are safe and sound! I guess this means that the images are in 4 places right now. They are on my MacBook Pro, Dropbox (for now), my server and my backup server. Sweet!

I am really excited about this newfound data transfer method and look forward to using it for future trips and even from here in Costa Rica this week for all my favorite photos. And thanks to the support people at QNAP for helping me get this set up.

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• Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!

• Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos, Alaska and more.

• You can purchase Jeff Cable Photography images from my new fine art site at: https://fineart.jeffcable.com/

• If you are interested in purchasing ANY equipment, please click here to go to B&H Photo, as I get a referral from them if you enter this way. It does not change the cost to you in any way, but it helps me keep this blog up and running.
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