La Paz Waterfall Gardens is an easy 90-minute drive from San José and an attractive first stop on the road to Sarapiquí. It brings several parts of Costa Rica together in one place: a large butterfly house, hummingbirds, forest and five waterfalls. After the butterflies and hummingbirds, you can take a longish walk downhill past the falls and then take a bus back to the entrance, which is a remarkably civilised arrangement.

I went there at the beginning of the trip, before I knew quite how many hummingbirds I would encounter farther north. The La Paz hummingbirds are clustered around feeders, which makes for a less authentic picture than some of the very natural locations in other parts of Costa Rica, but it was an excellent way of getting used to photographing this iconic bird family. To get these and the butterfly shots, I used the 50–200 mm f/2.8 lens with the OM-1 Mark II in pre-capture mode at around 1/4,000 s.

The butterfly house has some magnificent species. A Blue Morpho looks brown with its wings closed, while its upper wings show brilliant blue in flight. Capturing that colour meant following its irregular route and timing the exposure for the moment the wings opened. Photographing butterflies in flight, particularly these ones, is significantly more difficult than photographing birds in flight because their flight is extraordinarily erratic and fast. Their overall speed isn't that high, but they change direction repeatedly at subsecond intervals. In the end, I got the hang of the process, thanks to the great manoeuvrability of the OM camera and lens.

Just up the road from La Paz was the well-known Cinchona Café, which has feeders and fruit hanging above a dramatic valley. It has some interesting birds, but in a setting that does not look very natural. It's worth a stop if you are looking for lunch, but I wouldn't describe it as a destination for the bird photographer.

The album begins with the more arresting bird photographs, moves into butterflies—including the Blue Morphos—and ends with three views of the La Paz waterfalls. That order reflects the journey out of San José and up towards the Caribbean lowlands.

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