Author: DMcA

Sarapiquí is an area of Caribbean-slope lowland rainforest centred on the Sarapiquí River, north of San José. Tirimbina Lodge and its forest reserve span the river and is about 80 km from the city by road via Route 126, with a driving time of roughly two hours and twenty minutes. Its value for a photographer is not just the wildlife in one reserve, but the number of very different places within reach of each other. During my stay, I visited Tirimbina and La Selva for forest walks, Dave and Dave’s for hummingbirds, Pierella and Cope’s for smaller gardens and local wildlife, and Centro Manú for frogs after dark. There are other sites I did not get to. I stayed four days in the area, had some great experiences and got some great shots, and I’m pretty sure there was more to see and experience.

Tirimbina is probably the most famous lodge and reserve in the area. It has its own rainforest reserve across the river, reached by a 262-metre suspension bridge. The crossing is an experience and the forest is full of birds, but my early-morning guided walk was the least productive of these visits for bird photography. At the end, the guide gave me a list of 33 species we had seen, but I had only a handful of photographs I was pleased with.

This is the difference between bird spotting and bird photography. A bird spotter can identify a distant bird in the canopy, tick it off a list and be completely satisfied. A bird photographer has very different requirements: the subject must be much closer, with enough light, a clear view and, ideally, an interesting wing position. Tirimbina’s dense forest seldom gave me that combination, and its guides are more oriented towards bird spotters and much less aware of the needs of photographers.

The exception, and by far my best photograph from Tirimbina, was made outside the lodge on the main road. A Yellow-throated Toucan appeared at a cavity in a tree where the roadside gave me light and an open view of its flight path. I kept the camera on the cavity as it leaned out and launched. Twelve photographs follow it from the tree into flight, each showing a different balance of body and wings. The album also includes parakeets at balsa pods, a Tiger-Heron, a motmot and a White-necked Jacobin hummingbird at its nest, the only time I saw nesting hummingbirds in the entire trip.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right-hand corner to get the best viewing experience. For information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon. And finally click the “heart” icon for photos you particularly like – this helps me understand which photos are more popular

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.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right-hand corner to get the best viewing experience. For information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon. And finally click the “heart” icon for photos you particularly like – this helps me understand which photos are more popular

Regular viewers of this site will know I’ve become interested in using long focal lengths for landscape photography, initially in Moravian Tuscany in Czechia (here and here), and subsequently in the tea plantations of Sri Lanka.



The technique involves using a telephoto lens, typically 100–400mm full-frame equivalent (FFE), to get an interesting perspective of the landscape from a distance. The attraction lies in both the perspective compression the lens provides and the interplay of light and shade across the folds in the landscape — quite a different approach from conventional wide-angle landscape photography, and one that produces markedly different results.



Wherever I travel, I now look for landscape vistas that might lend themselves to this approach. A trip to Cape Town in December 2025 seemed a promising opportunity. The long vistas across the Table Mountain range felt like natural candidates, and this album shows the results.



All but two of these photographs were taken with the OM-1 Mk II and the 50-200mm (100–400mm FFE) f/2.8 lens, with a mixture of tripod and handheld shots.



Beyond the physical technique, the approach depends heavily on light and shade across the landscape, and I wasn’t particularly lucky in that respect. The best shots tend to come when shooting against the light, which wasn’t possible given my timing. I think there are better photographs to be had in Cape Town using this method, and I may well have another crack at it later this year.


Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right-hand corner to get the best viewing experience. For information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon. And finally click the “heart” icon for photos you particularly like – this helps me understand which photos are more popular