Today I spent a lot of time inspecting the three biomes at the Soil Factory, making a lot of field recordings and taking a lot of photographs and videos of the plants, birds, and insects.
This morning I started with field recording, and didn’t take any cameras with me. I wanted to try and figure out what was the best setup for recording, as yesterday my plans to use a shotgun mic turned out to be not what was needed. I decided to go minimalist and just use the mic on my Zoom H6N, and I think it gave an accurate representation of what I was trying to capture. In the audio below, you can hear the sound from the three different zones. The picture in the soundcloud embed shows the area I am recording in. Field 1 is the tall grass area on the right, field 2 is behind that int the back center of the image, and on the bottom left is the marshy field.
It was a very windy day, so audio recording was pretty tricky. I tried again around noon, using a Audio Technica AT 4041s, hoping that their less expansive pickup would help, and it did not. I decided to switch to video and photography for a bit after that, and had some fun taking some footage I need to process a bit, and getting a few choice shots of bees and other insects.
It’s not perfect, but it was fun to capture this little bee landing on the white daisy. If you look closely you can see the blur of the wing! I admit I’m not normally a nature photographer, so I was pretty excited about getting such a chance moment.
As the day wrapped up, I did my final round of field recordings around 7pm. It was approximately 7 when I first went out recording last night, and I was excited to get to see many of the same kinds, if not the same exact, birds and animals as I walked around. It will be interesting to see how many repeat themselves over the next few days! You can hear a few excerpts from tonights recordings here:
