An alien species

Caterpillars couldn't possibly be of this Earth. They must have come here from some asteroid of a mysterious origin, traveling at warp speed and crashing on our planet perhaps a billion years ago. They are simply too bizarre, too outrageous, and too ... extraterrestrial. I love photographing bizarre subjects (not to mention any type of alien species I can find), so I'm drawn to these fascinating creatures. This is the caterpillar of the Atticus atlas moth. When the caterpillar forms a cocoon, turns into mush, and re-emerges as an Atlas moth, its wingspan is a full 12 inches. I photographed this at a butterfly park in Bali, Indonesia with available light in deep shade. I used a 400mm focal, and that meant -- since I was only 4 feet away -- that depth of field would be very shallow. I wanted to show all of the remarkable detail, so I opted for f/16. That, in turn, meant that the ISO was pushed up to 6400. To keep the ISO as low as possible, I used a shutter speed of 1/125 instead of 1/400 which would have been 'safer' in terms of getting a sharp picture. Due to the slower shutter, I turned the image stabilization on.