Eyelash viper in green

One of my favorite pictures from Costa Rica is this eyelash viper. The dark background underscores the graphic design, and the combination of green and orange is always visually arresting. With venomous snakes, it's unnerving to be so close to them. One bite can ruin your day. The general rule is the maximum distance a snake can strike is one third to one half the length of its body. For my shooting distance with poisonous snakes, I triple that number! It was quite dark when I took this picture, and my settings were 1/320, f/18, and 10,000 ISO. I purposely used a small lens aperture to make sure the entire composition was tack sharp. Anything less than that would have ruined the image for me. I used Neat Image software to eliminate the noise, and my lens was the Canon 100-400mm lens set to 300mm. the shot was hand held.