Description of Image

A day on

Cape Lookout

Spending a day on Cape Lookout is a treasured experience for me. To spend an entire day, you need to actually camp out on this barrier island located about 4 miles off the North Carolina coast. Cape Lookout gives you peace, solitude, and serenity and you will most of the time have the entire island to yourself the entire time you're there, especially if you're there in the middle of the week.

Dawn begins with what photographers call the "blue hour" when the light progresses thorugh various shades of blue from cobalt through what I'd probably call turquoise before the sun begins to color the eastern sky. The first two photographs in this gallery were shot during the blue hours before the dawn from the NPS pier on the Core Sound side of the island. Often in the morning, you'll see beautiful reflections of Cape Lookout on the still waters of Core Sound. Dawn, when it arrives, can sometimes be a myriad of color, and other mornings less spectacular but beautiful all the same.

One of the things that you notice when you're on Cape Lookout is that the lighthouse dominates the seascape and is visible from everywhere you wander on the island. The day this series of photos were taken, clouds were drifting eastward, building to a warm June afternoon shower by the time the photo in the top right corner was taken. After the shower, the skies cleared, becoming cloudless in the late afternoon. The photo on the bottom left was shot in very harsh light that I normally don't choose to photograph in, but I decided to include that photo in this gallery to give a sense of the brightness out on Cape Lookout on a clear day.

As the afternoon begins to move toward evening, the light of the sun in the west begins to take on a warm gold glow at first, progressing to reddish orange as the sun descends further toward the horizon. The pilings on the pier are normally a pressure-treated lumber green in the full light of day but take on the colors of sunset and a beauty that would be missed at midday if you didn't know what was to come. Finally, after the sun had set that evening, the evening blue hour began, deepening slowly from the bottom right photo to a cobalt blue and then to the black of night.

I find days out on Cape Lookout to be special and a place that I can find peace and serenity. I hope you've enjoyed this brief description of a day out on that beautiful barrier island known as Cape Lookout.

Gary