This is a very rare sighting in Botswana of two black mambas mating. My local guide had been conducting safaris for 15 years and had never seen this. These snakes are so dangerous that when bitten, if not treated with anitvenom immediately, a person loses consciousness in 7 to 15 minutes and is dead in 20 or 30 minutes. The snakes are also very aggressive, so my guide wouldn't let my tour group start photographing until we backed our Land Rover up to within about 30 feet of the thicket where the snakes were intertwined. This way we could make a fast get-a-way if need be. It was a challenging photographic situation because it was very dark in the thicket; I determined flash was needed. I used a 500mm f/4 Canon telephoto plus a 2X teleconverter giving me 1000mm of focal length. The two heads were on different planes, so a certain amount of depth of field was essential. I didn't want one snake sharp and the other one soft. My settings were 1/160, f/14, and 1000 ISO. The long lens magnified movement, but I assumed the short flash duration, as opposed to a fast shutter, would prevent blur, and I was right.
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