Photographing Mountain gorillas in Uganda

Photographing Mountain gorillas in Uganda

Packing your mighty camera bag and booking that air ticket to Uganda is one of the highlights of any photographic trip to Africa, this can only be compared to Masai Mara and Serengeti’s annual wildebeest Migration, coming face to face with this gentle giants is one of the undisputed highlights of any travel to southwestern Uganda.

Photographing mountain gorillas in Uganda is definitely not an easy task. The foliage in the jungle is extremely dense and it makes movement in the area quite difficult. Trying to get a solid foothold is sometimes impossible at times. As the Gorillas moved around quite often, you will always have to follow them and this definitely limits the amount of equipment you can have at a time.

Advice on the Equipment

The lighting conditions usually go from bright sunlight to dark shadows depending on where they are at that moment. Some of the recommended camera settings will range from a 50mm prime, at or as close to an aperture of f/1.8 (on an APS-C size sensor). This will allow you to get a fast shutter speed to capture their expressions in high, sharp detail, and create a shallow depth of field to make them the focal point, and make them really stand out against their surroundings. We recommend going into such an environment with a lens range from 50mm to 200mm for the best opportunities.

Our Travel Advice

Depending on the main aim of the photography, if it’s not commercial photography then a normal gorilla trek where there are 8 people is fine but if you’re going to do commercial photography then we recommend booking the closed group where you purchase all the 8 gorilla permits hence having more space to move around and special arrangement can be done by Our East Africa travel specialists upon request.

When to go

Uganda sits in the Equatorial climate and the tropical rainforests can receive rain any time of the year however the best time to photograph mountain gorillas is during the country’s driest months from December to early March and usually, the tourist numbers are not as high as from June to October.