So, this situation was also incredibly stupid – I’d say tied with the crocodile picture from yesterday. I met a young guy in Florida whose hobby was keeping venomous snakes. When he told me what he had, I said, “wow”, I want to photograph those! I followed him to his apartment and in his walk-in closet he had some of the world’s deadliest snakes: an albino cobra, a green mamba, a desert pit viper, and more. The first snake I photographed was a beautifully patterned Gabon viper. He wouldn’t take it outside because if it escaped, it would definitely kill someone. Therefore, he placed it on the carpet of his bedroom, and I shot down on it so I could replace the background in Photoshop with something natural (which you can see here). When the viper’s head got too close to the toes of my tennis shoes (like 12 inches), the kid used a metal rod with a hook to gently move the snake away from me. When I returned home, I looked up the Latin name of the Gabon viper to ID it properly and happened upon an article about a woman who worked at the Los Angeles Zoo and kept venomous snakes. The article went on to say that her Gabon viper bit her, and she had just enough time to call 911 and then she died before the paramedics came.
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