My safari guide in Botswana spotted these mating black mambas in a dark thicket. In 15 years of guiding photographers on safari, he had never seen this. Instantly, his whole demeaner changed. All Africans are deathly afraid of venomous snakes and with good reason. A bite from a mamba means you'll lose the ability to speak in about 20 minutes, and in an hour you'll be comatose. In six hours you're dead. Because these snakes are so aggressive, my guide wouldn't let us take pictures until we turned the Land Rover around and backed in toward the amorous couple. Only then, if they came toward us, could we make a fast getaway. This situation was technically challenging because to fill the frame, I used a 500mm f/4 Canon telephoto plus a 2x teleconverter giving me 1000mm of focal length. That meant the depth of field would be very shallow, and I had to have the two heads sharp. The small aperture I needed reduced the light hitting the sensor even more than the deep shadow of the thicket, and that meant I had to use flash. With the camera I was using at the time, a Canon 5D Mark II, the combination of the long lens plus the 2x converter meant the autofocus was disengaged. So, I had to support the heavy lens with my left hand and also focus manually with the same hand while I pushed the shutter with my right hand. That was very awkward. I set the aperture to f/14, the ISO to 1000, the shutter to 1/160, and the exposure mode to manual. Once I chose the aperture, I adjusted the ISO until the exposure was correct based on several test shots.
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