Venomous

I photographed this eyelash viper on a red torch ginger flower in Costa Rica during one of my photography tours. I don’t go out of my way to seek venomous snakes in the wild because it’s simply too dangerous. Especially in the jungle, they could come out of nowhere and strike before you knew what was happening. This was a captive animal, but nevertheless you had to give it all the respect it was due! I specifically set this up so the background would go black. In other words, the snake and flower were illuminated by diffused daylight, but the shadows in the background were so dark that the limited dynamic range of the sensor made them black. My settings were 1/200, f/9, and 2500 ISO. I took this with a 100-400mm Canon zoom set to 300mm.