There were roughly as many people dressed in gorilla suits running a 7km route around the city of London on Saturday as there are mountain gorillas in the wild. It’s not a race, but a charity run to raise money to support the wild gorillas, and those suits make it a rather uncomfortable ordeal with those who actually run ending soaked with sweat. There were also others in various other costumes taking part, and Bill Oddie who started the runners and presented medals to all the finishers.
You can I think be sure that all the fur involved was synthetic and that the bananas provided for the runners were fairly traded.
I’ve yet to work out a really good way to photograph the event and the runners, and to get pictures that really satisfy me. Gorilla suits are tricky to photograph, being dark and detailed and need a fairly full exposure. You need a slow enough shutter speed to get a little sense of motion, but need to keep things reasonably sharp – either by panning or with a secondary flash exposure.
The start and finish areas tend to be rather crowded and the lighting there gloomy in the courtyards of tall buildings, while on London Bridge the runners were coming towards me out of a bright sun. If I photograph the event another time I think I will try to handle it rather differently.
This year’s pictures on My London Diary.