Incredible Hawaii Trip! 🌊

Welcome back to my channel and to the Connecting with Home series in which I wanted to consciously connect with nature and this incredible planet that we get to call home. I've broken the series up into four episodes, each one focusing on one of the elements. Earth, fire, water, and air. All the videos were filmed in beautiful Hawaii and very kindly sponsored by Nikon. Enjoy! It all rushes downhill, tumbling over rocks, waves crashing in this epic race to the sea, to a place where you don't need wings to fly, a place that cradles continents and washes this fragile world clean. But when did we stop heeding the call or honoring the messages bubbling from the deep? Even the ocean has her limits and no net is big enough to catch a second chance with our one perfect world. Our legacy must be one of resilience. So tilt your head back and catch a double shot from these weeping clouds that remind us drop by drop, why blue is this planet's favorite color. We're gonna try to hike down maybe to that beach down there. Wish us luck! This is how much longer we have to go but honestly walking down isn't too bad it's gonna be walking back up that's gonna kill us but it's worth it it's worth it already this is the view the whole way down so let's do this. Also I normally wouldn't even attempt to vlog as I'm walking down this super steep bumpy road because the shot would be too shaky but the stabilization in this camera is so good that I know I can trust this shot which is so freaking helpful when you're a travel vlogger and you can't control where you are and where you're filming you need a camera that can keep up and honestly this one is amazing. Oh my gosh this is how we feel about that. It'll be worth it! We watch the sun rise and set on it each day we drive to work alongside it to our families into the city to the surf and back again it's around every corner it's the view from every peak it is a constant in the life of a Hawaiian this constant is breathing for those of us born here we encounter the ocean often within our first year and it becomes a part of us it's under our skin it's in our blood the ocean is practically part of our family ever present in our childhoods our youths each day of our lives the ocean brings us a calmness and a peace a true lift of the spirit we find ourselves on its shores to begin or unwind a day to receive and to let go to fish to watch the surf to sit to sink our feet into the sand and reconnect to come home this is totally like Jurassic Park so we want to check out a farmer's market but um this is what's happening we're eating chocolate covered almonds trying to wait out this rain it's okay it's all part of and we have to respect the rain the rain is beautiful magical and when you're missing the rain then you realize how incredible important it is so yeah Louie and I do this thing where if we like start complaining about anything right away we're like I want something good about that and honestly after doing that for a while after doing that for a while it's like training me like so sexy if I look if I look outside I'm like oh it's raining and then I'm like no what's the beauty of that and I was in Cape Town when it was like a super severe drought and we literally had like a bucket that collected the water from the tap so we could flush the toilet with it so I've like experienced a little glimpse of what it's like to not get rain so I'm grateful for you rain I love you if you could just pause for a second to let us get out of the car that would be great totally sold me on it yeah hopefully it's a good one let's see what we got here testing the weather sealing all right let's go here we go I am soaked I mean look look at my dress like literally I mean I look like I just took a welcome to Hawaii yeah and now we are actually going to the other side of the island in the west side where it barely even rains so at least it's not raining right now so let's go let's get out of here here it comes here it comes double triple rainbow oh my oh my gosh rainbow rainbow we just got to a beach and we're about to go snorkeling and I'm super excited because we've been in Hawaii for a few days now and we still haven't been in the water which seems crazy so yeah we're gonna go snorkeling and the woman who gave us the snorkel stuff said that yesterday they saw a whale shark here so fingers crossed we see something like that but I'm putting sunscreen on I just wanted to give you guys a little reminder to always wear reef safe sunscreen because I was chatting to a friend who is from the big island and asking her where the best snorkeling spots are and she said a lot of the beautiful coral that she remembers growing up with is now dead or not as vibrant and there's a lot of different culprits for that but a big one is toxic sunscreen and lotion that tons and like think of the millions of tourists that come to Hawaii and wear like perfumes and lotions and sunscreens and stuff so please do your best to wear a reef safe sunscreen when you go swimming okay let's see what we can find guys how cool is this Hawaii's reef spread a home for over 7 000 species of marine plants and animals 25 of which are unique to Hawaii there is another Hawaii in fact there are many faces of Hawaii but one of our favorites exists under the surface consumed by the warm and clear pacific we can see life in a different light we can see the rhythm of nature in the flurry of a thousand fish we watch light dance witness the movements of the waves from below see the feet of surfers listen to the dull roar of a passing boat life from the other side there's a recognition that we do not own this place but we are simply being allowed to share it to borrow it surfers snorkelers scuba divers free divers fishermen and all of us who enter the ocean here do not confuse respect with fear but rather keep distances when necessary fueled mostly by a deep and humble appreciation for the ocean's power and its inhabitants like the other two videos this video was filmed on the nikon z6 and i've already told you a lot of my favorite things about it but i haven't really touched on the lenses yet so i thought that i would talk to you a little bit about that most of the lenses that dakota and i used for the series are from the nikor zs line which stands for superior optical performance the standout features for me are the super smooth quiet focus with minimal focus breathing which is when the lens zooms in or out a little bit when you change focus because of how wide the z mount is all of the nikor z lenses are super sharp from edge to edge with minimal distortion they're also really lightweight but super durable they have extensive weather sealing and let me tell you we seriously put that to the test i didn't realize but it's the beginning of rainy season here in hawaii and when we were on the east side it's like tropical jungle over there and it rains every hour or so out of nowhere sometimes it just pours like buckets and thankfully even though we got caught in a few little rainstorms with the camera it was perfectly fine so very grateful for that overall i've been super impressed and in case you're wondering the lens that i ended up using pretty much the whole time was this one it's the nikor z 24 to 70 millimeter f4s and as you can see it's very versatile and i just think it's the perfect lens for kind of every day and you pretty much know that you'll get the shot you want with this lens because you can zoom all the way out or it's the perfect lens to also vlog with so this is my personal favorite if you just want a quick simple setup we also played around with a few f mount lenses for which you just need the compatible ftz adapter which is this guy right here and it's perfect because even though the z mount is new you can still use your other nikon lenses with the adapter so yeah i hoped that helped some of you which were wondering which lenses we were using and i will link all the lenses that we used in the description down below thank you so much for watching thank you to dakota for helping me film this video and for writing and reading the poem at the beginning of the video thank you again to nikon for sponsoring this video and series and i will see you guys very soon for the last and final video in the series bye