Photographing birds and frogs in Costa Rica - Nature's awesome colors!

The past couple of days have had unusually high rainfall even for this area of the rain forest. I think we have amassed 5 or 6 inches of rain in the last 48 hours. But that has not stopped us from having a lot of fun and getting great photos.

For the past couple of mornings, we have sat on a covered patio here at the resort and photographed many of the local birds after breakfast. This has proven to be a really fun start to the day, and is the perfect way to wait out the rainstorms before heading out to our destinations.

Here are some of the birds that we have captured during our post-breakfast meet ups.

This is the female Red-leg honey creeper.

Here is a Grey-blue tanager.

...and a Baltimore Oriole.

This is the male Red-leg honey creeper...

...and because I love the look of this bird so much...a second shot.

This photo was taken on one of our outings. You can see the rain drops coming down around the Yellow-headed caracara (part of the falcon family).

Yesterday we made the drive to one of my favorite places here on the Osa Peninsula, where we have ample time to capture macro photographs of some of the local amphibians. And of course, this includes my favorite, the Red-eyed tree frogs. We were all shooting with Canon 5D Mark IV cameras and Canon 100mm macro lenses.

My job was to help the workshop attendees get great shots of the frogs. I would give them suggestions of composition, camera settings, and even ways to get the most of their Canon 100mm macro lenses. I would help them get their shots, but that did not stop me from getting some shots of my own.

This is my favorite photo of the trip so far, with the Red-eyed tree frog looking right at me.

It was fun to get photos of the tree frog on the Ginger plant. It helped to accentuate the red in the frog's eyes and added dimension to the photos.

This photo makes me laugh. I think I need to turn this photo into a poster-sized print with a caption that says "Having a tough day? Hang in there!"

As I mentioned, I was suggesting different ways to photograph the frogs. I encouraged the others to shoot photos from under the leaf, showing both the frog's head and the silhouette of his body.

After photographing the red-eyed tree frogs, we stopped for some lunch. After feeding ourselves, our guides went out into the rain storm to see if they could find us any poisonous dart frogs to photograph. They found this Granulated poison dart frog and we continued our macro shooting.

We shot handheld for a while, and since this frog was not moving too often, I encouraged everyone to use their tripods to guarantee themselves sharp photos.  We all took a lot of tight photos of this frog and I was looking for a different composition. I framed this tripod shot to show more of the plant (out of focus) with the poisonous dart frog (in sharp focus) at the top of the frame.

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