I recently returned from my 15th visit to Costa Rica, and my 13th photo tour in the rain forest of this amazing country. This visit was totally different from any other trip due to the excessive amount of rain that we had. Now I know what you might be thinking, and yes it is the rain forest, but we had a TON of rain on this tour. Even the locals who have lived in the area for their whole lives had never seen this amount of rain consistently falling. But that did not stop us from getting great photos and having an awesome time.
This was also the first time that I have taken the new Canon R5 Mark II camera on a photo tour, and it performed VERY well.
I had eleven guests on this trip, and took this photo on our first day on the Osa Peninsula. It turned out to be the only day without rain.
We ended up seeing more Toucans on this trip than ever before, and down low too! The cloudy skies did provide great lighting for photos and we turned these lemons into lemon aid.
These Howler monkeys were on the resort property, and perfectly framed with the lush greenery.
It is always fun to watch them munching on the leaves.
It was towards the end of our first day when we saw these Scarlet macaw feeding off the local palm nuts. We all had to shoot at ISO 10,000 to get enough shutter speed to freeze them in flight. About 6 months ago I started using
Topaz AI to take the noise out of my high ISO shots and it is amazing!
Macro shooting in Costa rica is great, even on rainy days, since we can shoot under cover. And as always, everyone had a blast photographing the Red-eyed tree frogs.
I never get tired of photographing these little frogs.
We had this Dart frog in perfect position for a photo, even with a long lens. I took this with my
Canon RF 100-500mm lens at 500mm.
From that day on it rained and rained and rained. You can see the water moving sideways on this photo of a Toucan in flight. During the hardest rains, I had everyone meet me in the conference room where I taught photography workflow and Photoshop retouching.
These two White-faced monkeys joined us for breakfast, literally hanging out 15 feet from our table.
Also joining us for breakfast, this Toucan came down to within 4 feet of the ground and everyone got really nice photos of this bird eating.
Since we had so much rain, I added an extra day of macro photography (since we could shoot under cover and stay dry). Since we visited some new macro locations, we got to see some new insects that I had never seen before. This spider has six eyes. How cool is that?
This spider was carrying an egg sack. All of these photos were taken with my
RF 100-500mm lens since I loaned my second camera (with my macro lens) to one of my guests.
I have photographed bats in Costa Rica before, but never up close. The people who went out and found subjects for us the night before our shoot, found this bat and had it for us to shoot. I love the way that it was looking right at me when I took this photograph.
We actually visited two new macro locations in one day, and when walking through the grounds of the second location I saw this beautiful Lilly in the water. It was perfectly covered in rain drops. I pointed this out to the group since it was easy to walk past, but worth a photo.
Once again we were treated to new subjects to photograph, including some species of frogs I had never seen.
It was fun to capture them up close but also from a little ways back, to show more of the environment.
Towards the end of the trip we had a little break in the weather and I decided to move forward with the boat tour on the bay. It turned out to be the right call, as we saw a couple of whales and lots of dolphins.
After seeing a lot of marine wildlife, our boat captains took us into the mouth of the Tigre River and we saw this awesome Boa Constrictor resting in the brush along the edge of the river. It did not rain hard until we pulled back to the dock at the end of the tour. Luckily we all had plastic bags to cover our cameras. We all got soaked walking back to our rooms, but were happy to have had such a great time on the water.
On our last day, we had light rain, but nothing that would stop us from doing the boat tour of the Sierpe River. And we saw a lot of great wildlife, including this Blue Heron
This Iguana was posing for all of us as we took it's portrait.
We were photographing this Egret along the shoreline when it reached down into the water and pulled out this fish. I fired off a bunch of photos and got this shot when the bird flipped the fish and I caught it mid-air.
On our way back from the river, we stopped by some feeders and captured photos of these beautiful birds.
Even though we had an unprecedented amount of rain, we all walked away with great photos and had an awesome time. Everyone enjoyed each other's company and learned some new photography tricks too. I always say that the most important part of my photo tours is to have fun. And coming home with great images, although very important, is secondary to the experience.
I am almost completely sold out for the Costa Rica Photo tour for 2025, but I just opened 3 new tours for 2026. You can check them out HERE.
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