Shadows and Light

This morning I have the house to myself, and I'm working on a story set on Tau Ceti.  It really needs to be a character-driven plot, since it's primarily a relationship story (instead of being a milieu, mystery, or status-quo story).  I wrote the original Very Rough Draft a few months ago, and I'm seeing the parts where I started to lapse into "Tolkien Hiking Porn for Space Station Tech Enthusiasts."  The mantra to repeat has been, "Advance the plot, reveal character."

On a completely different note, here's some photos from last weekend, when it was much less foggy.


I'd recently seen some back-lit photos of plants Pat Kight did, so during the Mt. Pisgah hike I was on the lookout for light shining through leaves.

 I like the contrast between the pale lime lichen and the orange leaves.

 Western Oregon trees have to support a lot of lichen.

 Some times the lichen is so thick, it's hard to know where a tree ends and the lichen begins.

 The sun came out about a third of the way through our hike.  The earlier rain gave everything a silvered sheen.  My camera is not capturing the brilliant greens everywhere.

The only macro-lens shot I took.  I would have taken more, but that would have required a hike about six hours long instead of two.