January 27, 2005
Short videos of Mather Lake
I took some 15 second Quicktime movies w/o audio while out at the lake, using my old Olympus. The camera is set up to point and shoot Quicktime .mov files at 320 x 240 and 160 x 120. The later is nearly useless for viewing. The 320x240 .mov files average 4MB in size. Unfortunately, most people don't use Quicktime, so I exported .avi movie files from each .mov file for folks using Windows Media Player.
The .avi files, as exported, average 25 MB in size. I'm getting the hang of this so I hope to cut the .avi file size in half while retaining the image quality.
Here's what I came up with:
Mather Dam and Morrison Creek flowing west
051.mov 4.3 MB
051.avi 25.7 MB
Trash in water on Lake side of Mather Dam
050.mov 4.4 MB
050.avi 26.3 MB
Looking south across the lake from the northwest shore
054.mov 4.2 MB
054.avi 26.4 MB
Panning west to southwest from the northeast corner of the lake near Douglas Rd.
060.mov 4.2 MB
060.avi 25.7 MB
A view of an inlet looking west from the east shore of the lake
069.mov 4.5 MB
069.avi 26.3 MB
The view looking west from atop the Morrison Creek Flume inlet
073.mov 4.5 MB
073.avi 26.3 MB
Posted by cystdog at 06:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 24, 2005
Photos others have taken of Mather Lake
I came across two photo archives of Mather Lake that were really encouraging to find. 
The first gallery, hosted on Yahoo by "mayrobinson26", is from a local resident who appears to regularly walk the trail north of the golf course and on into the lake trail area on the east shore, and to nearby vernal pools and prairie.
Their collections titled "prairie", "park", "Birds in Mather Park", and "Mather Regional Park" are a real treat. They even stumbled upon what appears to be a gopher snake while west of the golf course and Eagles Nest Road in the prairie area.
The second gallery, hosted on PBase by "Dave H", consists of photos taken from a canoe. Very Cool! They managed to capture several shots of a Great Blue Heron in take off and in flight, as well as a Great Egret "in repose" as they floated by.
The hightlight for me of their photo-journey was the crossing of the Morrison Creek Flume. When I spotted this, I was blown away, and am now determined to rent a canoe and do it myself.
They took a great photo looking back west across the flume to Mather Lake, showing a plush, green "explosion" on the other side of the cold concrete flume.
The flume crosses the Folsom South Canal and is about 15 feet above the water in the canal. After riding my bike below the flume, along the canal bike trail, and hiking past the flume from the lake side, seeing it from the Douglas side (now the Safeway shopiing center side) was pretty cool.
I hope to find more photos of the lake, nearby park and Morrison Creek, or photos of the seasonal vernal pools. If you have photos, and are either unable to have them hosted, or don't know how to post them online, email me and I'll gladly host them, or help you to set up your own gallery online.
Posted by cystdog at 06:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack