Ok. Full confession: Elevation was maybe 6' above sea level. I say 'maybe' because I don't know whether the tide was high, whether it was low, or whether it was somewhere inbetween. And yes, the shell (it's a standard Periwinkle shell as would commonly be found in countless places along the edges of most oceans) is indeed a SEAshell. I chanced upon it some 35 (or whatever) years ago in a seldom-visited section (specifically, at what's called 'Green Point') on an island (Monhegan Is.) some eleven miles off the coast of Maine. How the shell got there, however, is anybody's guess: a seagull dined on it's occupant and left the inedible part? a wave tossed the shell (sans occupant?) up onto the rocks? a rogue photographer who was in his Edward Weston B&W-ian phase of large format ptfoggerfity placed it on a weird looking hunk of rock ever so artfully? or, most likely, aliens who'd travelled 46.5 lightyears from their home planet to come to planet "Earth" to create havoc found the shell, ate it's occupant, left the shell as a warning, and called their conquest complete. Don't know when any or all of the above might've happened exactly (other than the havoc was done more than 35 [or so] years ago) but whenever havoc was done, that havoc would not have happened more than a century ago. Which --I'd presume-- would make any reference to millenia effectively moot.

All reasonable questions though, I'm.

Seen any Periwinkle-eating aliens in your neighborhood lately? If no, then good on you. If you have, I'd suggest you RUN AWAY! Better yet, you RUN AWAY VERY, VERY FAST!

Just lucky timing, really. Seeing bighorns around here isn't exactly rare, but seeing any in the particular place they were was extremely unusual. Of the total of 12 shots I managed to get --between constantly needing to look up and down the road to watch for approaching traffic [while I shot from my running vehicle that sat on the typically busy-ish two lane road]--, this was the only shot in which the ram (or either of the two ewes) didn't have his muzzle to the ground feeding, had been facing away and presenting only his sheep-butt, or was facing away from the better light. It was obvious and apparent at the time that of any, the shot I first posted would be the best of the lot.

Below is one of the alternate shots. Apart from minor cropping, it has not been otherwise edited. I think the beer can really makes the shot, don't you?

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Shot in b&w, so no, it wasn't converted from color.

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Ah! You meant it must've taken some time to do the editing, right? Well, yes, it took some time, but mainly because I process/edit every image I choose to post. How much time I spent on editing this particular image was, I'd imagine, about the same amount of time as it took to drive to where the bighorns (unexpectedly) were. Maybe 20 minutes?

Ordinarily, I have a reasonable idea as to how an image will get processed/edited as, or before, I shoot a shot. Other times, once I've gotten home and have seen an image on my monitor, some alternative form of editing may suggest itself. That was the case with this image --and it did receive a very 'alternate' form of editing, but one I've done plenty of times before in one variation or another--, partly because I hadn't expected to see any bighorns while on my way to somewhere else, and partly because the circumstances (no shoulder to pull off onto, no traffic in view at that moment but subject to rapid change [truckers coming from the Potash Plant do NOT go slow, and tourists are ordinarily more interested in looking at the scenery than they are interested in looking at the road], be foolish/illegal to shut the motor off to lessen vibration, &etc.) imposed their own unique shooting limitations.

In any event, processing/editing takes (me) very little time.

Some might say 'mystical' rather than 'magical' (please see my reply to UTMike), but a rose is a rose is a pile of uranium tailings....

Took very little time at all, Frank. I shot this shot all of two miles (as the raven flies) from home. Granted, I don't fly like a raven so I opted to drive, which meant having to go two or three times that flightless distance by road, but both of the traffic lights along the way were green and no time was lost.

Well, Mike, if the Atlas Tailings Pile (site of the DOE's UMTRA effort to 'cleanup' Moab's once glorious and towering uranium tailings pile) qualifies as an 'Enchanted Mountain', then yeah, seems accurate enuf. Because this ram (and the two ewes who accompanied him) were feeding 20' off the road --Scenic Byway U-279, a.k.a., 'The Potash Road'-- opposite what remains of that glorious and "enchanted" (despite its whittled-down and now diminished state) 'mountain'. One has only to drive past at night to experience the green sickly glow the (remains of the) 'mountain' emits in order to feel a sense of 'enchantment'.

Down along the road.

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Uh.... not quite always, l'n. Sorta recall that time when.... oh...... nevermind....................

Nice, fumi. Good to see you back around.

Interesting that you might mention that (the composition in the first), Poppie. The 'composition' itself is more a result of a manner of processing I've been doing these past several months, and is something many might not agree with or like, but what others don't like or don't agree with does not greatly concern me. In effect, that first image is an amalgam of three separate shots taken from several paces apart from each other, then processed/merged together as a pano rather than a stacked and de-opasticized (as in the Pep Ventosa manner) series of blended images. I've posted a few such images in the past, but nobody's noticed the planned and intended visual repetitions that result. Which is okay by me.

Got sorta muddied in the process.

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....along the road.

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The "few years you [or any of us?] have left"??? Good grief, Linda! How limiting! I (for one) prefer to think of that time 'left' as being in the hundreds, or the thousands, or maybe in the millions! of seconds left. And I (for another) intend to make the best of every last one of those, regardless the weight of a camera, as should our maturing OP.

Cluttered, Ken? Maybe so, but sometimes life can be so overly 'busy', can't it? even in the unhurried fractions of a second. So busy that --as in spring, when spindly new life threatens to blot out the old and burnt-out embers of staid complacency, whose looming elders tilt ready to rip you to bits or fall over trying-- what peace exists endures no more. Under benign but threatening skies, alongside a river of doubt, whose waters are constant, but are never twice the same.

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