Ok. 1st lesson. When doing night photography on the beach, make sure you practice a bit with the new ball head mount you got for your tripod during the daytime.
2nd Lesson. Even with a solid tripod, if there is a healthy amount of wind the strap on your camera will cause shake as it rattles around. I tried to secure it to tripod, but didn't have any tape or other useful things I could have used.
The situation for this shoot was a storm front was moving across the state about an hour south of us. I thought it would be a good chance to capture cloud lightning. For the most part I used 30 second exposures at f/8 on a Nikon D7000 with a remote. There was lots of lightning, but it always seemed to be flashing when I was trying to adjust the camera with the problems from above. Long story short, I consider all the pictures I took to be fails, but I learned some lessons along the way.
This was the only one I got with lightning involved, luck was against me all night.
This was my friend futzing around with a flashlight.
Some more futzing.
thanks for sharing this material I really like what you posted. Thank you so much
Thank you @jlufer