Uganda - Primates

Uganda – primates, rainforest and Africa's most vibrant faces

There are trips you take to photograph animals. And then there are trips where the gaze from an animal stays with you long after the camera has been put down.

Uganda is such a place.

We create this photo journey because Uganda offers something that few destinations in Africa can match: an unusually dense, varied and photographically strong concentration of primates. This isn't just about seeing mountain gorillas and chimpanzees, even though those encounters are naturally the obvious heart of the journey. It's about following humanity's closest relatives through humid rainforest, hearing calls between trees, feeling the mist in the Virunga Mountains and working photographically in environments where every frame carries presence, texture and history.

The mountain gorillas in Mgahinga are one of the trip's great highlights. Instead of seeking the most well-trodden path, we want to create a more personal and peaceful experience, where the encounter can take place. Here, in the mist-covered mountains near the border with Rwanda and Congo, the gorillas move through a landscape that feels almost too cinematic to be real. Moss-covered trunks, soft light, dense greenery and faces that say more than any caption ever could.

But Uganda is bigger than the gorillas.

We also seek chimpanzees in both Kibale National Park and Kyambura Gorge. It's a completely different type of photography: more mobile, more unpredictable, more intense. The chimpanzees are fast, social, loud and deeply fascinating. For a photographer, it's a real challenge — light, movement, vegetation, moments. When everything aligns, the images can be exceptional.

An important part of the journey's concept is also to highlight Uganda's lesser-known primates. The golden monkey in the Virunga Mountains. Red colobus. Black and white colobus. Green monkey. L'Hoest's monkey. Mangabey. Bushbaby. In total, there's the possibility to see and photograph up to twelve different types of primates during the trip. This makes Uganda one of the world's most interesting destinations for those who want to work seriously with primate photography — not just as species ticking, but as visual storytelling.

We travel during low season. Not because it's easier, but because it can be better. Fewer tourists, more greenery, ripening fruits in the reserves and a more genuine feeling in encounters with both nature and people. The rainforest is alive, humid, dense and sometimes demanding — but that's precisely why the images also become something other than yet another classic safari series.

And Uganda is not just primates.

We travel to Mabamba Swamp to photograph the peculiar shoebill — the bird that looks as if it stepped straight out of a prehistoric world. We do boat safaris on the Kazinga Channel, where elephants, buffalo, hippos, crocodiles and rich birdlife gather at the water. Here the journey can suddenly open up to more classic African photographic opportunities: bathing elephants, muddy buffalo, birds of prey, kingfishers and flocks of birds along the shorelines.

This is not a trip built to check off Uganda.

It's a photo journey created for photographers who want to get close — physically, visually and emotionally. Close to the primates. Close to the rainforest. Close to that moment when an image stops being an observation and becomes an encounter.

Uganda is often called the Pearl of Africa. For us, it's above all a place where Africa's wild faces come unusually close to the camera.