Move over Hawaii, because Costa Rica has the best tasting Pineapples in the world as they have found a way to take the acidity out of them. I could not stop eating them everywhere I went.

Four years ago I visited Costa Rica while on assignment to shoot a major ad campaign for a well known optics company. During my stay, I fell in love with the country and have since yearned to return.

A Costa Rica photo tour is a must for every photo traveler. Not only is it a beautiful country, but the birds and other wildlife are beyond your wildest dreams. There is another aspect of this country that continues to attract me as well, and that is the people that live there. They are well educated and extremely responsible and their happy nature and desire to accommodate my photo needs made this trip that much better.

A month before we left for our tour, I had requested that both Tortugero and Monteverde lodges set up bird feeders and perches. This gave the birds a full four weeks to become comfortable with the feeders.

I arrived at Tortugero 2 days prior to my group, so that I could fine tune the feeder setups as well as scout the area for photo opportunities.

The bad news was that nothing was coming to the feeders because it was mating season, and there was plenty of natural food around at this time. The good news was that I found a Roufus-tailed Hummingbird nest, Olive-backed Euphonia nest and a yellow eyelash viper snake in a tree. The snake stayed in the area for a week. All these subjects were at eye level which made for great shooting.

On the second day I took a boat out with a driver named Norton. The boat had plenty of room for my 600mm lens and tripod. Norton had the use of only one eye but spotted birds and critters like he had two with perfect vision. In fact, he out did me with my 20-15 vision after my Lasik surgery. The man had such amazing vision, I was thinking about putting a patch over one eye to see if it would work for me.

Shooting from the boat turned out to be very productive, since there was plenty of room for my equipment. The rivers and canals are quite calm and wondrously beautiful with lots of wildlife.

I shot Tiger Herons, four species of Kingfisher, Kiskadee, Jacana, Anhinga Nest, turtles, iguanas, lizards, Howler, white faced and spider monkeys just to name a few. I found the boat trip so enjoyable and productive that I decided to go back in the afternoon.

The two days I was there, I had dry weather most of the day. It would rain in the afternoon for a short while and then stop. This was to be expected as this is a rainforest.

The morning was beautifully clear, but by the time the group arrived that afternoon at 3pm it was pouring rain and it continued to rain throughout the entire night. The next morning it was still raining, and I checked with the front desk for an extended weather report. It was supposed to rain for the next 3 days. This was very unusual, as it is the dry season in this area. This is also a photo tour leader's nightmare. I started to make arrangements to leave that morning for another destination,but it stopped raining.We started shooting and were blessed with good weather for the next two days. I'm convinced there is a God out there, and the weather man never knows what HE has planned.

Our guide in Costa Rica, whose name is Jonathan, was helpful and valuable beyond our expectations. He has a degree in biology and knew the sounds and identification of everything we photographed. He found us snakes, Red-eyed Tree Frogs and many species of birds to photograph. He knew the habitats and found different species of birds and all other wildlife in the places we visited. Jonathan and Pablo, our driver, were assigned to us for the duration of our trip. Without Pablo, we would have been lost in Costa Rica in 5 minutes, as there are no street signs anywhere.

We used two boats for the next couple of days. The participants in each boat came away with different species. One boat, which I was not on, got just about every monkey species at Tortugero including adults with young.

Richard Mittleman got, what I think, was the best photo of the red-eyed tree frog head on with both eyes looking into the camera. Many of you have already seen that image as it received image of the week.

After two and half days of shooting at Tortugero, Don and Janice Cohen, Richard Mittleman, Bob Stronck, Steve Hutchcraft and June Thigpen were very happy campers, but the happiest one of all was me, as the rain could have been a disaster.

All my participants were accomplished photographers. Don won my Birds of Prey book in the Photomigrations contest, and Richard had image of the week with his incredible shot of the Pied-billed Grebes. Janice just started taking photography seriously a couple of weeks before the trip. She was using a Canon Rebel digital and a 100-400 zoom. It didn't take me long to figure out that photographic talent runs in the family - she's a natural.

Onto the Monteverde cloud forest which is about 5000 feet above where we were at Tortugero. On the way we experienced the wonderful scenery, rough roads and crazy drivers of Costa Rica. Talk about crazy, Don, Janice and Bob decided to take a canopy tour which was not recommended by our tour company. It lasted 3 hours. They were hanging from a strand of wire in 40 -50 mile an hour winds. It was raining on and off during this time. They were unable to take any photos, as they had to use both hands for braking while on the wire.

They described it as adventurous and exhilarating, I say it was insane.

The feeders worked well at Monteverde. I had received an e-mail from the hotel two weeks before I left saying they were having trouble keeping the Coati's and Anugi's away. I replied that this is just two more species for us to photograph, not to worry.

The most beautiful bird that came to the feeder was the Blue-crowned Motmot which otherwise would have been difficult to photograph. Steve "Motmot" Hutchcraft seemed to be a magnet for these birds as he found them everywhere. I think it was the attraction of his girlfriend June who was by his side every day. He even got photo of a male and female sitting beside each other.

The gardens around the lodge were beautiful, and the accommodations and food were also great. I'm now on the second hole of my belt instead of the third.

The Hummingbird gallery in Micheal and Patricia Fogden's yard is free to the public and offered some very exciting photography. We were shooting 9 species of hummers at their feeders perched right in front of us. Don got bold enough to try some head shots of a hummer with his macro lens where he was as close as two inches from his head. Talk about tame!

The yard is a feeding and fighting frenzy of hummingbirds as they constantly buzz your head. I even had one land on my tripod as our shutters were going off like machine guns on a war front. The shooting was addictive as we went back a number of times to shoot.

The Resplendent Quetzal is one of the most sought after and beautiful birds in Costa Rica.We tried to photograph it in a fruit tree almost every day. We would meet at 5AM and drive to Monteverde Biological Preserve, but the morning was always misty with some rain as this is a cloud forest.

Bob Stronck got the best shots of the group; I got nothing, as the front element of my lens got all wet. At least one of us was successful as I was happy to see Bob's photos at the airport before we left.

We shot butterflies and bugs in a butterfly enclosure which turned out to be pretty productive.

As good as the Pineapples were in Costa Rica, so was this trip, and it was hard for all of us to leave. This trip was so good that I am researching two new areas for next year, as everyone on the tour expressed interest in a return trip.

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