In November, I spent about 3 weeks in the rain forest of Costa Rica leading my 15th and 16th photo tours down there and it was awesome. Both groups were full of fun people who got along famously, and I was lucky enough to be with all of them.

As always, as I am teaching everyone, I am able to get photos for myself (although this is always secondary to my guests getting their shots). In this blog post, I thought I would share many of my favorite photos from both photo tours. This also gives you an idea of how many photo opportunities we have down there, and also shows the variety of what we see during the tour. This is way more images than I normally include in one blog post, but I thought it would be fun for you all to see them at one time.

(Note: after uploading all these, I noticed that I accidentally watermarked them with a 2024 date. That should be 2025.)

All these photo are in chronological order as they were taken, and almost all of them were captured with the Canon R5 Mark II and RF 100-300mm lens with either the 1.4x or 2x teleconverter.

I have photographed many Scarlet Macaw, but usually don't like capturing them from behind. But in this case, they were flying out over the marina and I loved the scene.

This is a photo I posted on social media as one of the favorites from the first tour, as we came across this mother and baby Howler monkey curled up together in perfect light.

This parrot was flying by and I grabbed a quick shot.

On our day of close-up shooting, we had a great time photographing the Red-eyed tree frogs. Since I have photographed them so many times, my goal now is to capture them differently than in the past. I stood back and shot this little guy with the RF 100-300mm lens with the 1.4x teleconverter. A little wider than usual but I like this composition.

It was a challenge to keep the focus point on the face of this Eyelash viper.

As we were driving back from the macro place, we saw this Fire-billed Aracari in a tree. We all set our face detection on the bird and, just after doing that, it flew right at us! What a cool perspective.

Since the introduction of "pre-continuous shooting" on the Canon cameras, I now love teaching people how to use this feature to capture birds doing more than just standing on a branch.

We would put our focus on them and wait for them to jump or fly, and then hammer the shutter.

Since I had recently photographed the Blue-footed Boobies and Red-footed Boobies in the Galapagos Islands, it was fun to capture yet another species to add to my collection, the Brown-footed Boobies in Costa Rica.

I liked the symmetry of these two Pelicans who flew by us during our dolphin tour.

Speaking of dolphins, we saw these two Spotted dolphins following the wake of our boat. Since these are my favorite animals, I always LOVE capturing photos of them.

It was our day off (during the first tour) and I was standing on the balcony outside my room, and saw these two Toucans hanging out on a tree just across from me. It was fun to capture images at their same level.

This Iguana made an appearance at the chocolate plantation.

We were all trying to get good shots of a sloth that was up in a tree, when one of our guides spotted this beautiful snake hanging out in a pile of leaves. We all had fun capturing the pretty colors of this subject.

We also had a Woodpecker in the trees above us.

The next morning, we were all having breakfast and saw a pack of Squirrel monkeys jumping from one tree to another. It was early in the morning and there was not much sunlight yet, so I thought that the only way to capture them in action was to motion pan them. High risk and high return! I was at ISO 5000 and still only at 1/100th of a second. I took a lot of photos, and managed to capture 3 or 4 that were sharp on the monkeys.

These White-face monkeys made me laugh.

Here is an American White Ibis hanging out on a branch.

We even had a rare sighting of an owl buried in a tree, with his eyes open.

We have raccoons back home, but until this last trip, I had not seen many in Costa Rica.

I loved the color of this Caterpillar that was hanging out on a branch next to the resort lobby as my first group was about to fly out. This was later become a Gypsy Moth.

I did not take too many photos during my 3 day break between photo tours, but I saw this Crested Caracara from the balcony of my room and could not resist capturing an image.

We saw endless amounts of monkeys on the property on this last trip. This White-faced monkey was very protective of it's apples.

This monkey was not far from the restaurant at the resort, but it had no need to order, as it was already enjoying a snack.

I never get tired of photographing hummingbirds.

As we started the next photo tour, one of the first things we saw were some Cattle egrets, young and old.

This was a great chance to teach the new group about exposure compensation, as these white birds flew in front of a dark background. It was critical to set the exposure of the camera to -1 or even -2 to keep the whites of the bird from being over exposed.

Two more White-faced monkeys keeping watch over each other.

A Squirrel monkey just hanging out, literally.

I photographed the phosphorescent bugs for the first time a couple of years ago and still enjoy doing that.

This was my first "action shot" of one of these bugs. :)

I have been to the beaches in Costa Rica so many times and never really photographed the crabs. After grabbing this image, I realize that I was missing something cool, and will encourage guests to get a shot like this in the future.

We were really lucky to come across about 20 Scarlet macaw that were flying back and forth to get palm nuts from a particular tree. This gave us a chance to capture them in flight.

This is one of the Macaw flying off of the palm tree.

This is now one of my favorite photos of a Scarlet macaw. Perfectly sharp with a palm nut in the mouth. This was taken with the Canon R5 Mark II and the RF 100-300mm lens withthe 2x teleconverter attached.

Here is yet another shot from the balcony of my room. A Fire-billed Aracari moving from tree to tree.

We don't always see the King Vultures on our tours, but this time we did.

We even saw a young Ant eater walking around in the grass. Another first for me.

I used to call our day photographing the frogs and snakes our "macro day" but some of my guests suggested that I call it "close-up day" instead since so many of us now use long lenses to capture the little creatures. Why have things changed? Because up until about 6 years ago, the long lenses would not let us focus within a couple of feet of our subject, but the news lenses do this easily.

More photos of the Red-eye tree frog. A very different look from the photo you saw previously in this blog.

More hummingbirds in flight...

...and more Eyelash vipers.

I love photographing colorful subjects and the Red-legged Honeycreeper had lots of color.

On the second dolphin excursion, we were all capturing images of the birds as they flew by. I focused on this Great Blue Heron as it flew low to the water. It was not until I was going through my images on the MacBook Pro, that I saw the fish jumping in front of the Heron. A lucky capture.

Jeffcable

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