After photographing in the streets of Limerick yesterday, today’s outing was a little bit more familiar. I walked the Lissycasey Cascades trail which seems to have taken me from County Clare, directly to the Pacific North West!

I spent a bit of time, laying on the forest floor, trying to take pictures of mushrooms with a camera that wasn’t really suited to it, before getting soaked through by a torrential downpour.

You see, much more familiar…

I made a couple of recordings of the rain, which is always a challenging thing to do. With my kit at least.
It usually involves attaching the recorder to a pocket tripod and then hiding it under something that’ll keep most of the rain off. I’ll then place my cap over the recorder and walk away, hoping for the best.

The recording below was done in this way. There are a couple of ‘direct strikes’, where rain drops have hit the microphones. Put your headphones on and give it a listen…

I reached the cascades just as the heavens opened even wider. There are a couple of shelters where I waited out the storm. Unfortunately, it was a typical County Clare storm and lasted the rest of the day. There was nothing for it but to try and take some pictures and record some sounds, while trying to keep the worst of the weather off my gear.

This next recording was the sound of the Owenslieve River busily cascading, babbling and being generally noisy. I used a technique that I’d learned from Mr. Acoustic Nature (Jared) that he calls ‘Interviewing the River’. It involves moving along the river bank, getting as close to each eddy and small waterfall to capture their own individual sounds, against the backdrop of the roar of the larger falls. I like the way this has worked out. However, I had to keep it shorter than I would have liked for fear of the recorder becoming totally waterlogged.

I’ll try again on a drier day…

Gubbins:
All pictures taken with a Leica M262 and either a 35mm Summicron-M ASPH or a Zeiss 50mm. Of course the colours didn’t really look like this, but this is how they felt. For those about to complain, I usually use black and white, and that’s not real either (apart from in Winter on the Burren!).

Sounds were recorded on a Zoom H5 Handy Recorder using the standard, XYH-5 microphone capsule.