Anyone who knows me, knows of my love for Africa. I got married there and have traveled back and forth now to nine different African countries in the last 4 years. I was so excited to get a call to do an assignment in Kenya! The assignment: Photograph the on-ground efforts of the Global Peace Festival and the Global Peace Service Alliance in Kenya. The non-profits have a very inspirational purpose, to help inspire people to believe that they can make a difference in Kenya future and to help spread the message that we are all one family under God. I will be getting into this a lot more in a future blog post on the project, but for now, I show you some nature pictures I shot along the way.

I added on to my trip a week in Uganda to visit friends and spend some time Gorilla Trekking. I have always dreamed of seeing Gorillas in the wild. The Mountain Gorilla is very endangered having only around 720 left in the world, half of that population is in Bwindi National Park in Uganda. It took around 2 and a half hours of uphill, no path, mountain hiking to find the family. Gotta love hearing the following from guides before a hike “watch out for the Black Mambas and the hissing Cobras” as I had a quick Kill Bill flash back. Luckly no snakes, just lots of non-human primates. The family we found had 2 silverbacks amongst it’s 18 members. The babies played feet from us, beating their chests and playing on some vines. After 25 minutes of running around and playing they all decided they wanted different food and ran, and we ran after then. It was an amazing experience. Below are a few of my favorite images from my very short amount of time I spent with them.

I also did a Chimp hike while in Uganda. The Chimpanzees where crazy active during the hike and despite numerous efforts they where not able to pee or poop on any of us (our guide was not so lucky).

I also want to give a huge thanks to my wonderful friends Andy and Megan for inviting me to stay in their beautiful Ugandan house for my last few days in Africa. You guys are awesome and I had a great time hanging out over Mad Men and Chinese food. It was just what I needed after 10 days of photojournalism in Kenya, then a week trekking in Uganda. Thank you so much!!!

So I am going to leave you guys with a few of my favorite images from my crazy adventures. I hope you like!

The DNA for Gorillas are almost 99% identical to humans, check out the finger prints.