Oak Island Light

Labor day weekend, my daughter and I headed down to Oak Island, North Carolina to get one more beach trip in before fall activities make it harder to get away.  It's not like we go to the beach that often. This was the third trip this year and is probably all I need as far as sitting on the beach goes.  As long as I have a book, I'm pretty happy.   Two of my goals this weekend was to capture the new moon in some way which obviously I did with the last image, but I've seen this so many times it's not as interesting as I would like.  The second goal was to photograph the Oak Island light, a lighthouse which isn't as attractive as many of the other lighthouses along the NC coast.    When I arrived on Friday night I took a walk out to the beach and was astounded as to how bright it was under the full moon.  The fourth photograph in the series shows the result of a self portrait taken at about 10:30pm in full moonlight.  The 30 second exposure allowed the stars to come in and if one looks closely, you can see the slight movement of the stars.
The lighthouse was shot on Sunday night.   No brilliant sunset that night, but an interesting sky none the less.  The sunset was shot on Saturday night right after dinner.  It had been cloudy, so we were eating dinner at the time.   I then looked out the window and saw the orange ball dipping down on the pier.  I rushed to get the camera and was able to catch just a few frames before it dipped below the horizon.  I don't shoot many sunsets.  I prefer to watch and enjoy them, but also I tend to look in the other direction to see what the intense light is doing.
The pelican was one of the first images of the weekend and I was so captivated by this image, that I spent the next 2 days trying to get a better one, without success.  That's the way it goes sometimes.