Venomous snake

Artistic images of animals aren't common, but when you are able to capture one, it's an exciting moment. In this shot of an eyelash viper in Costa Rica, the colors work together, the graphic design is attractive, and the shadows in the background went black which forces all of the attention on the subject. I took this shot in captivity because I will never seek out and photograph venomous snakes in the wild. It's just too dangerous. One miss-step, one mistake, one moment where you take your attention away from the snake and it's all over. My settings for this shot were 1/320, f/18, and 10,000 ISO. I had to have complete depth of field so both the snake and the flowers were sharp, but I sacrificed by using a very high ISO. Using Topaz DeNoise and Sharpen AI, however, I mitigated the degradation in image quality. The focal length I used was 300mm.