Images from the Central Pacific

I just returned recently from a photo tour with my friends and now three-time repeat clients Dick and Bert Wolf of Louisville, Kentucky. It’s always a pleasure to travel with Dick and Bert and, even though they shoot Nikon , we enjoy shooting together too. While Dick and Bert have traveled the world taking photographs, there are always a few new tricks to be learned in Costa Rica so we spent time on using multiple off-camera flash with the built-in flash on their Nikon D200 bodies as the master (or commander in Nikon-speak) and also on long exposures at twilight for some coastal scenes. When not working on the formal instruction, I had time for a few images for myself too. Here are some of my favorites along with a brief description of how they were taken.

This is an image taken just after sunset at a beach on Costa Rica’s Central Pacific Coast. Sometimes around coastal areas one can use rocks and driftwood to help compose for leading lines. But on this day the tides were very high. Nonetheless, by using the flow of the water and reflections of the small island just offshore, I was able to compose to have some lines leading the viewer’s eye into the picture. I got pretty wet in the process as the water flowed around me but I was very happy with the image.

Tech specs: Canon 5D, Canon 17-40 mm f4 lens, f22, 2 seconds, ISO 50, Singh-Ray polarizing filter, Singh-Ray 3-stop graduated neutral density filter, cable release, tripod.
This is the full-frame image and the only post-processing is removal of a few sensor dust spots.

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We went to my favorite seaside seafood restaurant one afternoon (great ceviche and you’ve got to try the Viagra soup — no kidding!) for some sunset pictures and to try to photograph the brown pelicans that frequent the beach in front of the restaurant where local fisherman often unload their catch. I wanted something a bit different than the standard pelican in-flight shot so when the Pacific Ocean lit up with the reflection of the sunset sky colors, I decided to go for an abstact type of shot. I wanted a slow shutter speed that would render the bird a blur and provide interesting texture for the water as I panned my camera with the flying bird. I chose a very small aperture and a low ISO to give me a slow shutter speed and then added 1 stop of exposure compensation to the darkish water to make it really glow. I used auto-focus on AI Servo mode to track the bird and chose a single focus point where I wanted the bird to appear in the frame. This kind of image may not be for everyone but I was really happy with it!

Tech specs: Canon 5D, Canon 300 mm f2.8 lens, f32, 1/2 second, ISO 50, handheld.
This is the full-frame image, and the only post-processing is removal of a few sensor dust spots. I shot the RAW file with a white balance of around 8000K to really bring out the orange colors of the sunset sky.

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The first day of the trip we went to the La Paz Waterfall Gardens, which is a really fun place to shoot. They have some beautiful captive toucans in the aviary but the light is very low, and the background is challenging with lots of branches and netting. What to do? Well, one answer is to use flash as the only light source and let the background go black for a stark, artistic type portait. Getting the flash off-camera is a great way to produce directional lighting with some interesting shadows for added drama, especially if you have someone to help out and hold your flash (thanks, Jose!).

Tech specs: Canon 40D, Canon 300 mm f2.8 lens, f5.6, 1/100 second, ISO 100, handheld, Canon ST-2 flash transmitter, Canon 430 EX Speedlite with softbox as a wireless slave.
This is the full-frame image, and there are no adjustments at all here.

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Photographers tend to bemoan the limited dynamic range in today’s digital cameras; for all of their sophistication, our cameras still can’t see anywhere near the range of tones that our eyes can see. I for one hope that there always will be some cameras with fairly limited dynamic range. It makes it easy to make a beautiful, artistic image when you have a bright subject against a dark background. To avoid blowing out the white subject, the photographer has to underexpose the scene, leaving the background nearly black — perfect! We went out at 5:45 one morning to photograph the cattle egrets that fly upriver every morning along a densely forested stretch of a river on Costa Rica’s Central Pacific Coast. I set my exposure manually to underexpose the background by about two stops and then set a small aperture that would give me a slow shutter speed. I tried a few shots at higher ISOs with the birds in sharp focus but just didn’t think that these conveyed the essence of these ghostly white birds flying along a dark rainforest river at dawn. I thought a blur would be much more effective in this sense, and I hope that this image proves me right. I tracked the birds using auto-focus in AI servo mode and then tripped the shutter when this pair of egrets passed low by the river and parallel to me. The birds that flew higher didn’t leave a reflection in the river, and those images just aren’t the same.

Tech specs: Canon 40D, Canon 300 mm f2.8 lens, f22 1/10 second, ISO 100, handheld.
This is the full-frame image, and the only adjustment was a slight increase in contrast.

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This image was a bit of a happy accident, but I consider it one of my best in terms of telling a story. I usually strive for pure nature images, but when this opportunity presented itself, I jumped at it. As we were driving up the Pacific Coast, my good friend, fellow photographer, and Foto Verde tour driver Jose Lopez spotted some scarlet macaws on the side of the road. We pulled over into a safe area and chased the macaws around as they fed in some beach almond trees. At one point, three or four macaws flew away from the almond tree and into a nearby tree that was separated from the rest by about 30 feet or so. Even though not great for birds in flight because it’s too short a distance to track them, it was the best opportunity we had to catch them flying. When I saw that the background was the overdeveloped area around Jaco Beach (with even a high-rise hotel and crane in the background) I took off my teleconverter to open up my field of view. I guessed and got lucky in anticipating that the birds would fly back toward the almond tree and across the small gap in the trees. I pre-focused manually and hoped for the best. When the last bird took off I followed him off the perch and snapped this image, which to my mind tells an interesting story about a lone scarlet macaw surviving against a backdrop of overdevelopment and habitat degradation.

Tech specs: Canon 5D, Canon 300 mm f2.8 lens, f5.6 1/1600 second, ISO 400, handheld.
This is the full-frame image, and there are no adjustments at all here.

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Want to see more pictures from this trip? Check out some more selections in the gallery here.

Text and images by Greg Basco. Submit a comment or contact me with any questions.