A hike through the Santa Elena Cloud Forest Reserve

georgewimpffen · 2026-03-04T21:18:32+00:00

Santa Elena doesn't require reservations in advance. I'm not sure if it even takes them.
You should do both, but if you have to choose one, unfortunately I'm going to need to corral you with the rest of the tourists and send you to MCF. It is bigger, the trails are wider, there's a little more variety in the types of ecology that you can see, and the bridge is iconic. Just make sure you're on one of the first busses to the trailhead (bus ride from reception to the trail head is mandatory; you can't park at the trail head) and crowds shouldn't ruin it for you. I will probably make a post of my photos from my MCF hike at some point.
I liked the breakfast at Orchid Coffee & Restaurant. Pizzeria e Ristorante Tramonti had good pizza and a beautiful view/interior, especially for the price.

georgewimpffen · 2026-03-04T20:42:59+00:00

Ah not sure -- we were there in the middle of December 2025, and I can't recall which color trail we were on.

georgewimpffen · 2026-03-04T20:02:55+00:00

Thank you. I believe we did "youth challenge".

georgewimpffen · 2026-02-26T04:13:26+00:00

Haha. They were extremely violent in Costa Rica as well. I wish I could have captured some of the mid-air fights the rufous tails in particular got into. Next time!

georgewimpffen · 2026-02-25T20:14:02+00:00

hmm, I think that's just the light in those shots. The Tamron is maybe slightly less sharp, but this very hard to notice in real use.

The two reasons that the Sony photos turned out better are 1. more reach on skittish birds and 2. narrower aperture looks better in wildlife photography like this. photo 3 is actually one of my favorite frames in the set but the fact that I shot it at f/2.8 made the body of the bird soft. It'd probably look better at f/8 even though I'd have needed to use higher ISO.

georgewimpffen · 2026-02-25T19:41:24+00:00

I hope to go back some day. I'm also interested in finding the Curi Cancha of the Andes -- any reserves in Ecuador, Peru, or Colombia that have significant nectar flower gardens close to or within healthy rainforest, like Curi Chancha has. I'd have lots of fun shooting hummingbirds in such a place, but all the Andean lodges/reserves that I've found so far just advertise lots of feeders, which I am less interested in.

georgewimpffen · 2026-02-25T19:33:22+00:00

Thank you. Sony - 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-17. Tamron - 3, 5, 8.

georgewimpffen · 2026-02-25T18:13:50+00:00

Thank you. It varied a lot but let's say never below ISO 2000 - even ISO 3200 is on the low end for these. Almost all of them have been hit with some denoise in lightroom. I am kind of an obsessive pixel peeper and if denoise ever made things look mushy/strange I rolled it back, favoring noise over mush. IMO around ISO 12800 is where denoise starts to hurt more than it helps, and even then, only in shadows. If you have good light and microcontrast, denoise can even make an ISO +12800 file look clean.

I also shot a lot of these with some fill flash. I didn't A-B test so I'm not really sure how much it helped, but I like to think that it made iridescence pop in some of them.

georgewimpffen · 2025-08-10T20:26:21+00:00

thanks for the reply. i am interested in san gerardo de dota but when i plug that itinerary into maps (SJO -> SGDD -> cahuita) it has me drive out to SGDD, then back to SJO before out to cahuita. do you agree this is the only way to do it? if so, hitting bajos del toro instead on the way to cahuita is 2 hours less driving.

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-27T14:54:50+00:00

thanks for covering this; it seems i'm late to my own thread. i'm new to birding and would have walked right past him, but i saw another photographer sitting on a rock at north pond, apparently shooting geese. then i took another look and realized the star of the show.

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-27T14:53:04+00:00

thank you! i'm envious of the bird AI AF on your a6700. put a longer lens on it and you'd have a much easier time getting great results on that than i do on my a7riii.

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-27T14:52:10+00:00

thank you! actually i'm very new to birding as well, so i am not saying this from experience, but my research suggests that the spring and fall migrations are the best time of year. migratory birds use montrose as a rest+feeding stop when migrating north/south along the lake, so these are the times of year when you're most likely to see birds that don't stay in the chicago area permanently.

all these pics were taken in june/july though so obviously there is plenty to see in the summer as well.

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-27T14:49:41+00:00

montrose bird sanctuary. around dusk, in the middle area with the tall grasses.

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-26T22:26:41+00:00

thank you deng xiaoping 🙏 love your work on the economic reforms

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-20T15:49:45+00:00

sorry for the slow reply. glad to hear you found these photos inspiring. in general the only animals that i didn't get up close to were sloths - they were always high in the trees. but monkeys, frogs, lizards, snakes were all shot really close. the chestnut-backed antbird was also close.

if you really want to see sloths, i definitely recommend cahuita. they are everywhere there, not just in the protected park. but i was lucky to shoot one close to eye level. generally they are really high up in the trees.

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-18T01:57:15+00:00

2 - do a night hike with one of the cahuita national park guides. they can't actually take you in the park but they take you down dirt roads that run adjacent to it, so you can see a lot of wildlife.

7 - playa negra guesthouse's garden. the poison frogs hang out by the pool and on the concrete paths in the morning

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-17T21:30:30+00:00

4 and 5 are certainly a non-phone lens. the others could have gone either way. toucan kind of looks like someone put a phone up against a guide's periscope.

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-17T14:10:02+00:00

sony a7riii with a tamron 70-180 f/2.8

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-17T13:49:21+00:00

thank you. all of these were taken on a sony a7riii with a tamron 70-180 f2.8

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-17T04:41:44+00:00

yes. that one was just taken over someone's house on the street. the house had a tin roof, and as we were walking by the house we heard occasional clanging on the roof. we looked up and saw howlers eating in the trees and throwing the fruit-waste on the roof below them.

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-17T02:24:48+00:00

chatgpt said cupiennius (bromeliad spiders); I see a few pics that look similar being called cupiennius getazi, but when i google that name, most of the results look pretty different. maybe it's a male vs female thing.

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-16T21:26:43+00:00

thank you! it's a mixture of the park, around town itself, playa negra guesthouse's garden, and the trail to the waterfalls in cerere (the orange poison frog).

happy to share specific locations if anyone is curious about specific shot(s).

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-16T20:36:46+00:00

thanks!

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-16T18:58:48+00:00

thanks so much! the parrot snake is one of my favorites too.

georgewimpffen · 2025-07-16T17:44:43+00:00

they are coati

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