Landscape and Wildlife
Thank you for reading my stories and looking at my photographs. Behind the lens is Christopher Becerra, a citizen of Costa Rica born in the city of Golfito in 1990. I moved to Cartago to study business at Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica in 2007, then moved to Alajuela in 2010 after graduating. Since then, I have worked for ten years in multinational companies, starting as accountant at a Costa Rican software developing company, then moving into IT in a large consumer goods enterprise and more recently as a Lean Six Sigma practitioner at my current employer, 3M. That sums it up for my professional background, but it does not explain at all why this site came to life. The following story will answer that.
(BTW, the photo on the right shows my previous hairstyle, when my curly hair would grow fast!)
When I was a kid, I read a Spanish book titled La Tierra y sus recursos (translating to Earth and its resources), by Cuban geographer Levi Marrero. It’s a geography book dating from 1981; our copy was missing the front hard cover and a few pages had cutouts, a testament of the heavy use it had seen by my older brother and sister. There were wonderful illustrations and photographs, but there was one in particular that caught my attention: The Grand Canyon in Arizona. I made it my childhood dream that I would visit it someday and admire its vistas. This dream would fuel my appreciation for all things natural that our planet has to offer.
Fast forward to 2010. When I started working, I realized how little I knew of Costa Rica. My small world was comprised of Golfito, Cartago and Alajuela downtown, and my jobs’ location in La Sabana. I joined a hiking group and visited many beautiful places just 1 or 2 hours away from the capital. We would do one-day trips to places no one else knew about: I even visited Cerro Pelado well before it became famous among hikers. Bridge cameras were all the rage at a time when phone cameras were not “good enough”, so I bought one to document all my trips. I immediately fell in love with photography, not just for the results, but for the process to visualize, compose, take and review those photographs. I was not a “selfie” photographer, I wanted to create photographs that showcased how beautiful those places were. None of those photographs survive anymore, but it was a very important learning period for me.
With advice from a friend photographer, I bought my first DSLR, a Nikon D5300 with the kit lens (18-55mm) and I added in a zoom telephoto (55-300mm). I felt that photographing birds was particularly enjoyable for me, so I joined a birdwatching tour with Fundación de Rapaces de Costa Rica, which I found while searching for birding tours on the internet. I instantly became hooked! I bought the Birds of Costa Rica guide and went on every birding trip I could. I learnt a lot, not just about the technical details of photography, but about biology, ecology and conservation. I also understood that I wanted to create great landscape pictures, the kinds of which I would like to hang on the wall of my home, which brought me into field photography workshops with ToTheWonder. With them I visited various places in Costa Rica and traveled to Canada in September 2017 for a weeklong workshop that taught me the essence of capturing landscape vistas on camera.
About this time, I resolved to create a website to showcase all the beauty that I have had the opportunity to experience as I travel Costa Rica and beyond. The site’s mission is to help conservation efforts and raise awareness of all the diversity available in our country (and potentially our world), by publishing high quality photographs from every wildlife species to be found in Costa Rica, a daunting task indeed! There are more than 900 species that have ever been recorded in the country, along more than 200 amphibians and another 200 reptiles. That’s still missing the incredible marine diversity along both coasts, the elusive mammals, and the arthropods that fulfill important roles in the rain forest. But through this work I hope to inspire more people into admiring this natural beauty and dedicating just a little bit of their effort and resources into conserving them for posterity.
Along the road, I have met many friends and picked up other hobbies like mountain biking and piano (click to watch me play). The bike plays along well with photography, as I sometimes bring my camera gear on my back as I pedal through the roads and trails. I have also spent a lot in photo equipment, and my Amazon Wishlist is still really long (and expensive!). At the same time I have come to realize that it is not the equipment that matters, but the passion that one puts into it. The process itself to create the photographs is relaxing, while the hard work at the computer to edit the final photos brings a sense of satisfaction when I see the end results in front of me. I can’t help but crave spending more and more time with nature, behind the lens.
I hope you continue enjoying my stories and photographs for as long as my life will allow it. Please get in contact if you have any questions, suggestions or stories to share. You can either email me at c.bq@live.com, write through the contact form by clicking on the right hand tab in the upper navigation pane, or add me on Facebook if you would like to chat.
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The Nature Admirer 