SF/bay area local knowledge query

Hi all,

I have a couple of friends staying with me (Caroline and 15-year-old son Daniel). They want to make their way up from Mountain View to SF, ideally to visit Fishermans Wharf for the, er, wharfing, or whatever it is they do there.

What's the best combination of Caltrain/BART/Bus/whatever to get them there and back, remembering that they don't know the city, so simplicity is favoured over speed.

Thank you in advance... :-)

Redwood

This is the one OK result (at least of mine -- Caroline and Daniel did a
lot better) from our trip up to the Armstrong Redwoods State Reserve,
which is roughly a 2 hour drive north from San Francisco.

The large tree on the left is about 12 feet in diameter at its base, and
very tall indeed. The left side is partly covered by blue-green lichen,
so I converted to B&W by choosing something like 50% green + 50% blue in
channel mixer, with red turned off completely. This brought out the
lichen quite well -- more red reduced its value too much. I didn't need
to adjust the scale signficantly in curves, just a minor tweak to again
help bring out the lichen. The camera used was my 4x5 Cambo Legend with
a 150mm Nikkor-W at f22 (equivalent to roughly a 55mm lens on 35mm), using the
bag bellows so I could get a bit more movement. The standards were set
vertical with a spirit level (my cheapest bit of camera gear to-date,
about four dollars!), no tilt, swing or lateral shift, but quite a bit
of front rise/rear fall to frame the image better without needing to
tilt the camera up. I used the BetterLight on full resolution at a
1/12th sec line time, so the exposure was loooooong (several minutes),
so the plants waving in the breeze ended up distorted in the
characteristic manner. I thought about cropping them out and just going
for the texture of the bark, but decided later that a warts-and-all
approach is interesting in its own right -- we aren't used to seeing
scanned images, but the motion artefacts do have their own
characteristic, so I'm inclined to go with it rather than pretend it
isn't there.

I did have bad problems with flare that day, but examining some of
Caroline and Daniel's photos turned up the same kind of problems, so I
think it was just very bright areas of sky (clouds strongly reflecting
IR most likely) showing through the canopy that was doing it. If I see
the same thing again, I'll swap to the thicker IR filter intended for
use with tungsten lighting that blocks about 10 times as much IR.

This coming weekend, we're going to Yosemite on Saturday and Mono Lake
on Sunday, so hopefully there will be a few more shots to post next
week, assuming all goes well.