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The story behind that funny upside down umbrella...

Many people who have been visiting my website are asking what’s the point with that picture on the main page, in which I’m holding an inverted umbrella pointed at the forest canopy. Is he trying to collect Brazil Nuts? Is HE a Brazil nut? Well, not really!

I guess I’m kind of nuts indeed to come up with such a thing… But that rig you see on the picture is just a home-made dollar-store-style parabolic reflector, used to give directivity to a regular microphone. When recording natural sounds (such as bird calls), sometimes it’s necessary to amplify the target song in comparison to the background sounds. That can be achieved either by using a special (shotgun) microphone, or a regular (omni-directional) one coupled with a parabolic reflector that concentrates a given sound to which it is pointed. Both options tend to be quite expensive devices, however. So, being creative can save you a couple hundred dollars. This umbrella reflector costed me something like US$ 4 (not including the microphone) plus a couple hours of inventive work.

Obviously there’s always a tradeoff between how much you spend and the results you get, but in this case the improvisation works quite well. Besides, if it happens to rain while you’re recording in the woods, that homemade parabolic reflector may quickly be used on the original purpose that it was built for!

If you go to the site’s picture galleries, you can hear some sound samples collected with this kind of equipment.

27/05/2005 | Posted by Daniel De Granville

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