It was our fifth day in Costa Rica trip, and our first day visiting Manuel Antonio National Park. Unlike our previous locations in Costa Rica, this area was much warmer and had a lot more humidity. And luckily, we had clear skies with no rain.
Upon entering the park, we were stopped by countless people trying to get us to pay for parking and hire a guide. Even though this was a bit of a "hard sell" approach, we did stop and hire someone to guide us through the park. Having walked through the forest in Monte Verde without seeing much wildlife, we were hopeful that having a guide would add to our experience in Manuel Antonio. Our guide, Jorge, spoke good English and proved to be a valuable asset for the day. If it wasn't for him, we would have missed 90% of our day's photo opportunities.
My main gear for this day was the
Canon 1DX, and
100-400mm lens.
Now...join me as I take you through our first day in this National Park. It was a photographic bonanza!
We entered the park and walked along the trail, often stopping for our guide to show us creatures that were hidden in the trees and leaves. This lizard was hanging out on one of the large leaves, and we photographed him from the side. But when I walked under the tree and saw the silhouette of his body, with his face peeking out, I preferred this composition. This is one of my favorite shots from the trip.
Here is another creature that our guide spotted, that I would have never seen.
After seeing lots of reptiles, I was wondering if we would see any monkeys. I woke up to the sounds of Howler Monkeys coming through my hotel windows, and was hoping to see some of these guys.
And then, we walked down to the beach and picnic area and saw some raccoons scouring for food.
Just after shooting this photo of a raccoon, I looked up to see a couple of white-faced monkeys on the tree 10 feet from me. I was VERY excited to photograph these primates in the wild.
I quickly focused and started shooting photos of this guy in the tree. I was not sure how long they would stick around, and wanted to get some nice shots of them.
I moved around the tree to different positions, which gave me different backgrounds. In this case, I had foliage far in the background which helped me isolate the monkey.
And then it got even better, when this adult monkey showed up with a baby on her back. Most of you know that I am really passionate about my photography, but you should have seen me at this point. I was in photographic heaven. :)
I think I was moving around more than the monkeys (but not swinging from any trees).
The baby stuck out it's tongue. I don't think this was directed at me, but...
This is one of my favorite photos of the monkeys, with this adult hanging out on a tree branch, seemingly checking out the scene.
Here are four photos taken within seconds of each other. I just love the bond between the two primates.
Look closely at the baby in this shot. Doesn't it's face look like that of an old man?
Here is a wide shot showing how they use their tails to grab the tree.
This is a crop of the previous photo. This is a good example how a crop of an image can tell a completely different story. No tail in this shot, but a great back-to-back pose from my subjects.
As soon as I saw these three monkeys grouped like this on the tree branch, I quickly zoomed out and framed this shot. Yep, more favorite photos!
This monkey yawned, and I focused quick enough to grab the sot. No, those are some teeth!
Good photography means that you are always ready to capture the scene unfolding in front of you. In this case, the monkeys were on the move, and making their way from one tree to another. I waited for them to be in between both trees and got this shot.
After shooting hundreds of photos of the monkeys, someone pointed out this iguana that was near the beach. He was in perfect light, so I walked around to the bright side of the reptile and shot this.
We decided to hike farther down the trail along the edge of the beach, as we had a couple of the white-faced friends follow along with us.
And yes, I could not help myself, and kept shooting more photos of the baby.
As we hiked back to where we started, we passed another raccoon who was resting on this log. We have raccoons where I live, but you rarely see them during the day. This was a nice chance to get a photo of this animal up close and in good light.
We then hiked back away from the beach and deeper into the forest. Once again, we found some cool reptiles.
At one point, we stopped for water, and I looked up to the see this spider web. If we had been in this spot 30 minutes before or 30 minutes after, this scene would not have presented itself this way, but we were lucky, with the sunlight perfectly hitting the web.
Before going to Costa Rica, I had never even heard of a sloth. But after searching for one for many hours, it was cool to finally see one of these strange creatures. It was a good thing that I had the Canon 100-400mm lens, since this guy was really high in the tree. BTW, you can tell that this is a male, since only the male sloth's have this striped pattern on their backs.
(Photographer's note: Since the sloth was surrounded by so much open sky, it was hard to meter him correctly. In evaluative metering mode, which most cameras are defaulted to, the bright sky would cause the sloth to be a silhouette. So I changed the metering mode of the camera to spot metering to make sure that the sloth was properly exposed. I knew that the sky would blow out, but that was a trade-off I was willing to make in order to get the sloth lit correctly.)
Here is another shot of the sloth up high in the tree. I swear that this animal looks like bigfoot.
On day 2, when I photographed the tree frog, I thought that I had already hit the highlight of my trip. But having a chance to photograph the monkeys in the wild was equally exciting to me. At this point, I could have gone home happy, knowing that I had some cool photos for my collection. But we still had one more day.
Stay tuned for the blog of our 6th and final day in Costa Rica.
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7 comments:
Glad to see someone took as many pictures as I did!! Aren't they a kick?? I was lucky enough to get images of a sloth eating. That just about filled my card!! Howlers make great alarm clocks. Check out the spiders too. Huge!!!
Dear Jeff, ~ You continue to regale us with these sublime images! "I wish I were there" becomes "I wonder what he'll see next" as you hunt for and find such captivating subjects with us viewers by your side.
Hey Jeff, Bet you wish you had your tripod for some of the shots, It's pretty dim in the jungle. I take it you had the lens locked on 5.6. D.O.F.
is pretty bad at 400 in that light but your focus point was really good. Keep these blogs coming. I really look forward to them.
Daniel Kehoe
Couldn't help noticing the range of ISO's and shutter speeds with the same F-stop, and they're ALL so perfect!
Found myself saying wow out loud, over and over.
Jeff, Were you using flash on those imagines? I was afraid that the fill flash would scare off the animals. You got some great photos. We didn't see half of what you saw. I am enjoying your images.
Wonderful shots!
Some fantastic shots here Jeff.
Like a couple of the other commenters, I'm surprised how well you got decently sharp images without a tripod (unless I missed something and you had one?) and with a non-IS lens.
Iguana 1/20s @ 285mm.
Monkeys 1/80s @ 285mm.
Raccoon 1/40s @ 320mm.
Slow shutter speeds to hand-hold at those focal lengths and with potentially moving animals.
It just enforces what a great photographer you are!
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