The two eyelash vipers you see here, as well as the glass frog, were captive; the hairy caterpillar and red-eyed tree frog were in the wild. So these vipers are seen in staged, carefully handled scenes. Just to give you an idea of how quickly they can strike—their main prey is the very fast-moving hummingbirds.

The first viper is curled up in a heliconia plant, which is exactly the type of plant a hummingbird is attracted to. The second viper is in a scenario that’s similar to how it might exist in nature, using a moss-covered vine to transit between trees in a quest for food. I shot these in a covered, open-shade area, with no glass between myself and them.

When shooting larger species like this, I focus on the eye first. My style is usually a shallower depth of field, but especially so in jungle-like situations where there’s a lot going on in the background. The Tamron 50-400mm VC lens does a beautiful job of capturing bokeh, so I can get really sharp detail around the eyes set against a nice, creamy background that doesn’t detract from my subject.

Although I try to minimize how many leading lines there are in any given situation, I like to make sure there’s a line somewhere in the image, so that my subject has somewhere to go—because we know they’re usually going somewhere. Even with the viper on the flower, there’s that leading line through the image that’s created by how the flower is positioned.