Photogear recommended for Costa Rica Birding adventure. This is our only opinion based on the previous experience.

My travel photo bag is very compact. I am trying to get everything in 3 bags. One of them check in and 2 carry on. My photo bag for carry on is Nanuk 935. It’s a good bag or a box some would say but I am planning on replacing it with something else. The go to lens would be 70-200mm plus TC or 100-400mm lenses. The 400mm length will take care of the 80% of your shots. I use two lenses 70-200mm and 200-600mm. These two lenses cover my whole range of shots. I also bring with me 1.4x and 2x TCs. You may want to bring a macro lens if you have one. For macro shots I use NISi macro extension lens for my 70-200mm lens. I am not naming any brands because then I have to list all lenses that belong to this range. You can bring anything you like or what you have. Just make sure it won’t exceed your luggage count. Remember? One checkin and one carry on. Time to admit that our transportation is also has some limits in terms of luggage space.

I think it’s a good time to talk about camera bodies. I usually take two. Just in case one will break and I can use another one. If you have only one camera I don’t think it’s a problem. I traveled with one camera for a long time, no issues but it’s up to you. If you care about your gear it should be OK. We had someone dropping camera in a water and dropping tripod of the slope of the mountain but hey it won’t happen to you because you will not going to bring tripod with you. Totally useless in our business. Monopod YES, and big NO to tripods. You can use monopod as a walking stick at list. Oh yeah, if you drugging big old 600mm f4 with you then may be, just may be you will need a tripod. For new and light 600mm monopod work just fine.

For Wide angle lenses I would recommend either a good phone like (iPhone 12/14 or equivalent) or 16-35mm lens. No point to bring 10 prime lenses. 16-35mm will work just fine even 24-70mm will work OK. Not as wide but will do the job in most cases. I personally prefer a phone. You can do wide shots, portraits, video and you name it. Yes, you can do macro. And when you want to share something with the world or show your wife and kids world’s laggiest cockroach you can do that too. If you have any other questions about what photogear to take to Costa Rica you can shoot me a note in contact page.

I will talk about this a bit in more detail on the video that I am planning to release soon. I will add video to the blog.