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Cellpic Sunday – The Backward Mailboxes

Two backward mailboxes in Florida.

Traveling U.S. 90 in the Florida panhandle.

In September 2023, when traveling through the eastern coast of Florida and Georgia, we opted to take U.S. 1 and U.S. 17 rather than the Interstate system. It’s a slower pace of travel and generally less traffic. When we left Georgia, we opted to travel across the Florida panhandle via U.S. 90 rather than I-10. It was along this rural highway we noticed something interesting about mailboxes in some areas along the route. The image above was captured between Monticello and Greenville.

At first, we didn’t understand why the mailbox doors were not facing the highway. For many years, I’ve seen mail carriers in rural areas drive slowly to the boxes, reach across the front seat, open the box, and put in the mail. In some areas, the postal employee even has a right-hand drive vehicle so that there is no need to reach across the front seats of the car.

If you look closely, you can see the grass on the other side of the mailboxes is disturbed by wheel tracks. In this area, the postal worker simply drives off the road and onto the area on the other side of the boxes. It completely removes the hazard of a slow or stopped vehicle on the side of the road and eliminates the need for a right-hand drive vehicle. In some areas, we noticed an actual dirt roadway for postal employees to use.

About the photo: I was in the back seat of the Suburban we were riding in and I set my Samsung S23U to Pro mode and 1/6000 sec. to be sure I didn’t get motion blur as we were traveling along the road at around 55 miles per hour. It was also hard to capture a mailbox as we went by so I had a wider angle shot that I cropped to square. Zooming in on the crop in editing, I could see that the phone added an almost artistic blur to the grass. I experimented with Luminar Neo and found that if I used the sharpness tool, the image came out better in that regard, but the truth is, I like the grass as originally interpreted by the camera’s software, so I left it alone. There was also some color noise in the image due to the high shutter speed but Neo’s noise reduction tool did a nice job of reducing it to a minimal level. To pixel-peep in 2K HD, click on the image where you can view it on my Flickr site. That artistic impression of the grass and trees is most noticeable when you click on the image again for an even closer view while on the Flickr site.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s acceptable as well. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment. Oh, and, you don’t have to post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner

46 comments

  17. How interesting! When I had learnt a few years back, I was very surprised by the fact that in the US, people don’t need to go anywhere to drop their letters in a central box somewhere but that the mailman collects it from the mailbox outside everyone’s houses! I guess though this would be in the suburbs and not in the big cities.

    Reply

    • Suburbs mostly. But even then, to cut costs, many developments have centralized boxes within a block or so of the majority of residents. When we wintered in Arizona, the walk to the neighborhood box was about a block and a half for me.

      Reply

  19. I guess that’s really a good idea, although you have to keep pulling out onto the road, which can be dangerous as well. I wouldn’t have guessed why these were backwards, so thanks for the explanation.

    Reply

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