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.

When you are hauling around both photo gear and audio gear, things can go wrong pretty quickly. One of those moments comes when you have your camera on a tripod and want to record sound at the same time.

The Zoom H6 might be called “Handy” but it is anything but if you want to use it in the field and you have no place to put it. I am, for example, not willing to put it straight on the beach or in wet grass.