Snapping Up Costa Rica Many Nature Photographers Are Odder Than Anything Living In The Rain Forest

Costa Rica’s lush national parks attract nature lovers like country music festivals attract horizontally challenged people in skin-tight jeans. They are “picture” perfect.

Before I arrived in Costa Rica, I’d never done any nature photography, but I figured this would be the perfect place to start. I took two Kodak panoramic disposable cameras and boarded a bus to the famous Monteverde Cloud Forest in the north central part of the country.

I met Lars and Jens, two Danish travelers, on the bus. Lars was a butterfly aficionado. He showed me his entire collection, telling me how and where he caught his favorites. Jens, the larger of the two, weighing in at about 280 pounds, had just spent the last five years working as a cook at a scientific outpost on a glacier in Greenland. He had no visible interest in Monteverde but seemed to have been dragged there by his buddy.

After we ate lunch together at the park entrance, Jens decided to stay in the restaurant for another hour. His mouth crammed full, he waved a chicken breast, motioning for us to go on without him.

Lars and I started down the path, and in moments he spotted his first prey: a yellow and white butterfly. I watched as he crawled silently with his net, raised it slowly into striking position and nabbed his victim with a laser-fast swipe. Through the mesh net, Lars gave the butterfly a few finger flicks to the head to knock it unconscious. Then he carefully folded a paper coffin, inserted the butterfly and dropped it in his satchel.

Costa Rica has one of the largest butterfly populations in the world and Lars was in heaven. We decided to split up so I could take some pictures of my own.

There were no actual clouds in the cloud forest while I was there, but the vegetation was amazing. There were plants growing on bushes growing on trees. I began snapping pictures of wild flowers. It wasn’t long before I ran into my first fellow photographers. Tom and Susan, from Colorado, wore matching khaki-green fishing vests.

Tom was staring through a lens the size of the Hubble telescope and Susan was holding something that looked like Captain Kirk’s phaser. I walked up next to them and, using my one-focus-fits-all disposable, took a picture of the beautiful red flower they were shooting.

I had, according to Tom, just pulled up to the Indy 500 in a Dodge Dart.

He suggested I look through his lens. As it turned out, Tom and Susan weren’t even taking a picture of the flower. They were taking a picture of the navel of some micro-bug surfing in a dew drop inside the flower.

Me: How many pictures are you taking of that bug?

Tom: A few. I’m just bracketing my exposures.

Me: Of course you are.

Susan: We have to account for the neutral density filter.

Me: Naturally.

Tom continued showing off his camera. This knob adjusts the f-stop, he explained. This red button over here is the aperture filament locator, blah, blah, blah. I just kept nodding my head. Susan tried to convince me I was never going to enjoy nature photography until I spent at least $1,000 on equipment.

I walked with them to the next flower. Tom carried the light meter and his bag of equipment. Now it was Susan’s turn and she decided to shoot two flowers together. This took a while to set up.

“What’s the problem?” I asked after 15 or 20 minutes.

“I’m having trouble focusing,” Susan said.

I left them and continued along the trail, taking as many pictures of the other nature photographers as I was of nature. They were all contorting themselves into awkward positions to get the “right” shot. The bugs and birds and frogs were just sitting there, probably watching the photographers with the same curiosity I was.

When I got back to the park entrance, I found Lars and Jens in the restaurant. We took a short walk over to the hummingbird feeders to watch the high-speed birds in action. Tom and Susan arrived shortly after, and I introduced them to the Danes.

Susan began explaining the challenge of photographing a hummingbird. The object, she said, was to capture the hummingbird’s wings without motion. I snapped a few shots, which Susan announced would turn out blurry. So what, I said, that’s how they look in real life. If I wanted to take a picture of a bird without blurry wings, I’d go to a natural history museum.

As Tom and Susan set up their synchronized flash, I realized nature photographers love the hummingbird because it’s a “gearhead” bird. You need about $10,000 worth of equipment to get the perfect shot.

All five of us were watching the same hummingbird and thinking different thoughts.

I was trying to capture the natural blur of the wings.

Tom was probably shooting an amoeba on the bird’s head.

Susan was trying to make the wings stop flapping.

Lars was poised with his net, dying to catch one of those buggers just to test his speed.

Jens was probably wondering what they tasted like.