Yes, you can take photos and videos of mountain gorillas on a trek in Uganda, using any camera or phone, for personal use. The rules are simple: no flash or lights, keep at least 7 m away, stay with your group, keep quiet, and stop when your hour is up. Drones and commercial filming need separate permits from Uganda Wildlife Authority.

The photography rules

Flash and lights can startle gorillas and are banned; turn off autofocus-assist lamps too. Do not move closer to get a better angle; if a gorilla approaches, your guide will tell you to step back. Avoid sudden movements and loud shutter bursts, and keep phones on silent. Selfies are allowed if you stay at a proper distance and do not turn your back on a silverback in a way that worries the guide.

Getting good photos within the rules

Light in the forest is low, so use a fast lens, raise the ISO and use a shutter speed of at least 1/250 s. A zoom of 70-200 mm or 100-400 mm is ideal. Keep some time to watch without a camera; one hour passes quickly.

Drones and commercial filming

Commercial filming, documentary work and drones require permission and fees from Uganda Wildlife Authority and, for drones, the civil aviation authority. The gorilla permit costs US$800, or US$600 in April, May and November. See our guides to the 7-metre rule, camera settings, drone rules and filming gorillas.

Frequently asked questions

Camera Equipment for the Gorilla Trek

The equipment restrictions that apply inside the national park focus on flash photography — which is prohibited at all times during the gorilla encounter — rather than equipment type or quantity. DSLR and mirrorless cameras with telephoto lenses are permitted and produce the best results for the encounter’s variable lighting conditions. The forest interior’s low ambient light and the gorillas’ dark fur create the most demanding photographic conditions that many wildlife photographers encounter, and the camera settings that produce acceptable results in the forest are significantly different from those used in open savannah wildlife photography.

A lens in the 200-400mm range provides the flexibility to capture both full-group compositions when the family is spread across a clearing and tight portrait frames when an individual approaches close to the group’s boundary. The 7-metre minimum distance enforced by rangers means that a 300mm lens on a full-frame camera is the practical minimum for detail shots; a 400mm or 500mm lens provides additional reach for the moments when the family remains in the forest’s deeper sections. A monopod rather than a full tripod is the recommended support for the trek — tripods are awkward on steep terrain, and the encounter’s rapid movement requires the mobility that a monopod’s single-axis support provides without the stability penalty of handheld shooting at long focal lengths.

Editing and Sharing Your Gorilla Photos

The raw files that a gorilla trekking session produces typically require more post-processing than most wildlife photography — the forest’s low light, the rapid changes in the gorilla’s position and distance, and the one-hour time constraint all create a higher percentage of technically imperfect images than a controlled outdoor wildlife session would generate. The editing workflow that produces the most usable results begins with a culling pass that identifies the frames where the gorilla’s eyes are sharp, since eye sharpness is the single quality criterion that determines whether an otherwise technically challenged image is worth retaining or discarding. The RAW file’s shadow recovery capability — the ability to lift the underexposed shadow areas of the gorilla’s dark fur while maintaining acceptable noise levels — is the most important post-processing tool in the gorilla photographer’s workflow, and it is specifically this capability that differentiates the results achievable from the serious camera system and the smartphone’s computational photography regardless of how well the smartphone’s automatic exposure handles the difficult conditions. The sharing decisions — which images to post publicly and which to keep private — involve a responsibility consideration that goes beyond aesthetics: any image that clearly identifies a specific lodge, specific trail section, or specific family position creates information that, in aggregate, assists poaching operations in estimating family locations. The responsible sharing guidance from the UWA and the Bwindi lodge community is to share images freely but to avoid geotagging the precise encounter location on publicly visible social media posts.