Hello, little DangerNoodle.
One of the key things I found down in Botswana when taking pictures was to always keep your eyes open. One morning as we finished the morning drive, I was heading back to my tent to drop off the camera gear before lunch was served. A slight motion caught my eye ahead on the path, and when I stopped to look, this fellow was keeping his eyes on me.
This is a hatchling African Spitting Cobra. It is NOT an animal you want to get bitten by; I’d probably have a better chance of surviving a bite from one of the lions than this snake, all in all. I put on the 300mm lens and knelt down around 2 to 2.5 meters away from him and took this series of shots.
For some reason, I had the camera’s ISO set a bit high, so they came out a bit grainy. In order to make these a bit more presentable, I applied a noise reduction filter in Lightroom for this particular set. (The rest, with the exception of some exposure and white balance correction as well as occasional slight rotation to make the horizon horizontal are generally untouched.)
And before anyone asks, yes, I kept a safe distance. I was watching constantly for any s-curve in the body suggesting he was making ready to strike, and you can see that you don’t see that at all in these images. I was both wearing sunglasses and had the camera between myself and him should he try to spit, and was always at least 2m away, so never closed in enough to really have him go into full defensive mode.
That being said, this was, all in all, probably the single most dangerous encounter I had during the entire trip, and I was very aware of that at the time, so worked to minimize that danger in terms of my positioning and actions.
This is more or less what he’ll look like as an adult.
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