Last time I wrote about the early morning ambience at The Ovens Nature Park. The sound was just amazing and at 5 in the morning, there was not a soul around to ask me loudly what I was doing.

That kind of interruption is all too common, so the earlier in the morning, the more successful the recording can be.

When you are in a nice place, you often hear sounds you want to record. Only to find that you have just a cellphone with you. Those recordings usually don’t cut it. The Ovens near LaHave in Nova Scotia is such a place.

Except that I did come prepared with a Zoom H3 and my two Behringer C-2s.

A few nights ago, I woke up to some lightning. As is my habit from years ago (read: ages ago), I counted the seconds until the thunder. At first, there was none. Then some 50 seconds, not enough to get up from my warm bed.

Then the gap shortened to some 12 seconds and I got up to close all windows in the house.

We all know that photography can select or eliminate elements from a picture. The saying goes that if it’s not in the frame, it doesn’t exist. In all my years of photography that has been true. Even if it was inevitably in the frame, there were ways to get still rid of something in post-processing.

For sound recording, that is quite different. We may have microphones that are predominantly sensitive in one single direction like shotgun mics, but they don’t eliminate everything else.