COSTA RICA : WILDLIFE AND WATERFALLS

You can drive from the Caribbean Coast to the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica in a day. In between those intensely blue seascapes, a dream occurs. Pura Vida. The Costa Rican favorite phrase. Pure life. Adventurous life. A life, bounded by waters, with green and clouds in between. There is no wondering about why the camera falls into immediate, lasting love with Costa Rica.

You pass through green forests, shocking in their density and verdant color, and home to a boundless array of creatures, and then ascend in winding fashion into clouds hovering on the tips of the trees. You hear the calls of the forests—monkeys, birds—and the quietude of the vantage points high in the hills. And come back to blue, and the vastness of the oceans. If you want to clear your head, and shuck off the weight of a world constructed of concrete and populated with traffic noise, bound up in a daybook overfilled with pressure and appointments, Costa Rica beckons both your soul and your camera.

Costa Rica is a place where the tripod must come. Waterfalls are a signature of the landscape, and they often demand a very thorough hike to access. Lightweight tripod design, a nonpareil trifecta of portability, durability and stability are indispensable. The performance aspects of Gitzo make it adaptable to the most uneven and slippery of surfaces. I used the Series 2 Traveler, 4 section tripod with the Series 4 center ball head for fast set ups on the rocks!

The Gitzo Adventury backpack is also an excellent hiking mate, as it has enough interior room for long glass, multiple camera bodies, and exterior straps where the tripod can live. Long exposures for turning fast moving water into silky streams via lengthy shutter speeds require a durable, fixed platform for the camera.

For long glass, seeking spectacular but tiny birds way above in the canopy, stability whilst searching and framing is a huge assist. Gitzo ball heads are omni-directional, which is very important given the unpredictable nature of their flight paths. Paired with a ball head, the performance features of the design make the tripod easy to extend in immediate fashion. A truism of birds is that they generally don’t remain static for long, so ease of setup is paramount. If you are flailing about with a non-cooperative set of sticks, the bird is gone. Gitzo in the field is seamless, in a word. 

Gitzo ball heads are ideal for swinging and adjusting the camera and lens to accommodate fast moving, erratic monkeys. Maintaining the frame and composing are all so much easier with a stable tripod. The Gitzo Traveler, for instance, is light but rock solid. You can frame coherently, fine tuning with the braking action of the ball head, and shoot lots of frames. Which is called for, as you, being on the jungle floor, are looking up into leafy backlight. A good photo strategy is obviously to bracket the exposure on such a scene. Stabilized on a tripod, you can program a bracketing series into the camera and burst frames.