Rural Route

One-a-Day Photo Challenge
Day Four:  Letterbox

My first instinct was to post a picture of a mailbox for today's photo challenge, but that didn't seem very creative. There are other kinds of letterboxes, after all.

There's the treasure-hunting hobby called letterboxing. It sounds like an interesting pastime, but it isn't one of mine, so I have nothing that relates to it to photograph.

There is also letterbox video, which is what you see when those black bands appear above and below the widescreen movie you're watching on your (old) television set. I probably could have flipped through enough channels to capture a shot of that, but I didn't want to spend my morning watching TV, and I get hooked so easily.

So I went back to Plan A:

(Mailbox lettering obscured to preserve privacy of neighbors.)

You know what? I had fun! I walked to the end of my driveway to see whose nearby mailbox provided the most scenic background and started snapping pictures. Our road is a busy one. To avoid alarming drivers by aiming my lens in their direction, I pointed it up into the trees a lot. And there were woodpeckers in there!

Photographing birds is much more fun than photographing mailboxes. Most of my woodpecker shots are blurry--all that rat-a-tat head motion, you know--but a couple of them are really nice. And on the way back up the driveway I captured a nice shot of a hawk landing in a tree in my neighbor's yard.

Not a bad way to spend a cold winter morning.