Traveling and Photographing in Costa Rica

This last month I found myself traveling all over Costa Rica, for weddings, other photography jobs, and also personal projects.  I wanted to put up a quick post to show a little bit of how the month went.  Eventually there will be a blog post on each of these projects, but for now this is just a little taste.  The map below shows all the places in Costa Rica I traveled to in these few weeks.  In a perfect world, these projects would be in order from North to South or South to North, but it worked out where I had to travel back and forth from one border to the other several times.

Starting from the south, I had an epic wedding in Matapalo on the Osa Peninsula.  Osa is so remote from other parts of Costa Rica and you really feel that you are just dropped off in the rain forest.  Some of the most extreme 4×4 roads I’ve ever been on just to get to the ceremony location, and so worth it.

The next point north on the map is a coffee farm near San Vito and the border of Panama.  This was a personal photography project I had been planning with the owners of the coffee farm for a few month, and we were just waiting for the rains and the end of the year harvest.  An incredible experience and definitely my favorite personal project of the year.

I also found some time to shoot three weddings in Manuel Antonio, one in El Parador Hotel, one in La Mansion Inn, and the last one on the beach in Playitas.

I also had two weddings at Zephyr Palace and Villa Caletas in the mountains of the Central Pacific.  One of them we had scheduled a day before session on the beach in Jaco, hence the casual dress.

I also shot a conference in Tamarindo, Guanacaste.  It was a conference for the destination wedding industry in Costa Rica and it was great to have a chance to get together with everyone who works in weddings in the country and take steps towards promoting standards on a national level.

My last project was at an indigenous reservation in Palenque Tonjibe en San Rafeal de Guatuso.  Every month the National University of Costa Rica (UNA) sends their veterinarians and vet students to a different indigenous reservation to provide a free clinic for their animals, everything from the livestock which they depend on to basic care for their household pets.  These clinics are set up in very remote conditions for people in need.  I’ve always thought that this was a great project and I offered to go along and shoot the clinic so they would have photos to use for promotion and fundraising.  It was another incredible experience that reminded me, that even in the busy season, I need to still make time for my personal photography projects as they refresh my vision and creativity and makes me fall in love with photography all over again.