Earlier this month I got to spend nine wonderful days running around Costa Rica on a photo workshop.

And, since I have had very little experience with wildlife/bird photography (and the country has LOTS of both), this was a great learning experience for me. I certainly had a lot of misses but I’m very happy with the surprisingly many shots I got right.

In this post are a very few of my favorite images from the trip, with a larger (but still relatively small) collection in this gallery. I’ll probably do at least one more just to illustrate the wide variety of birds that nest in Costa Rica and will update this post when that goes live.

At the top is a landscape shot, the view from around 11,000 feet. From our vantage point above the cloud forest, our guide says that we could see the Pacific Ocean in the distance. I took his word for it.

One sunny morning we visited a farm where macaws that were injured or formerly kept as pets had been sent in the 90’s and early 2000’s to re-acclimate to the wild. The birds decided not to leave and the flock has flourished ever since. And I learned how to capture a bird in flight.

On a boat trip down the Sarapiqui River in the Costa Rican rain forest, we spotted this American crocodile just lounging on a log. It blinked and stirred a little but really didn’t seem to notice – or care – that we were taking its picture.

Evidently, birders come from all over the world to catch a glimpse of the resplendent quetzal. We got up very early to be waiting when the birds came for their sunrise breakfast and they didn’t disappoint.

Costa Rica is home to at least 35 species of hummingbirds and we got multiple opportunities to photograph a lot of them. Which was a good thing because it took me several sessions to get my settings and techniques right to get some decent shots. These are volcano hummingbirds. I think.