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Inside Scuba Issue #29
Byron Conroy & Andy Deitsch
March 09, 2025
Welcome to Issue #29 of Inside Scuba
Welcome to this issue of Inside Scuba! While Byron and Andy are off on another adventure, this time in Lembeh, we’re bringing you a streamlined edition of the newsletter—but one packed with great content. This issue continues our special series featuring refreshed articles from Alex Mustard’s archive. Alex has revisited and updated some of his classic pieces, and this time, he dives into using strobes to mimic the alluring effect of sunbeams underwater.
We’re also excited to share an exclusive interview with Roger Munns, an acclaimed underwater cinematographer and director of photography whose work you’ve likely seen in Blue Planet, Planet Earth, and Netflix’s Our Oceans.
Enjoy the issue!
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What’s happening in this edition?
Interview with Award Winning Underwater Cinematographer, Roger Munns
Roger Munns. Photo Courtesy: Roger Munns
Roger Munns is a British underwater cinematographer and an Emmy™ and BAFTA award winner. Based in Sabah, Malaysia, Roger is a highly accomplished Director of Photography (DOP) specializing in underwater sequences, with over 30 natural history ocean sequences filmed over the past two decades.
Most recently, Roger served as the series-wide Director of Photography on Our Oceans, a landmark Netflix series narrated by Barack Obama, which explored the world’s oceans. His extensive body of work includes being a principal cinematographer on Blue Planet II—where he filmed 10 stories—Director of Photography for Apple’s Under the Sea screensavers, and a sequence cameraman for Planet Earth III.
In this interview conducted by Aoife McKiernan for Inside Scuba, Roger shares insights into his career and the challenges of filming in extreme underwater environments.
In each issue of our newsletter, we will curate some top dive news from around the world. Links to each of the original articles are available.
BBC: “The fearless lionfish huntresses of the Caribbean. Two women are working to save the coral reef from the invasive lionfish, using it as a sustainable teaching tool and cooking it into everything from tacos to fish and chips.”
Tampa Bay Times: “These park rangers oversaw Florida’s only manatee refuge. Then they were fired. The Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce are impacting the only national refuge created specifically for threatened manatees.”
Dive Magazine: “Two Russian divers have died after being swept away by strong currents while diving near Verde Island out of Batangas, in the Philippines. Local media reports one of the divers had an arm severed after being mauled by a shark.”
Divernet: “Musician’s diving death: faulty reg or alcohol-related disease? A final verdict is now expected in May following completion of an extended inquest into the scuba-diving death of a British music producer in Australia in 2019. The coroner is considering the evidence, after the final days of the hearing last week centered on the stumbling block of missing servicing logs for the rental regulator used by the diver.”
Island News: “CAPTAIN COOK, Hawaii (Island News) – Hawaii County firefighters rescued a couple stranded in waters off Pebble Beach Monday afternoon. The fire department reports a man and woman went scuba diving at around 1:15 p.m. in the Captain Cook area. HFD says they underestimated the rough and high surf, lost their mask and a fin and became tired trying to make it back to land.”
Dive Magazine: “Sea Story survivors speak out - Part 3: Trapped. DIVE talks to Michael Miles, a 71-year-old Swiss diver who spent some 36 hours trapped in his cabin in the capsized Egyptian liveaboard, Sea Story”
BBC World Service: “Cave diver Jill Heinerth is one of the world’s greatest explorers. After the largest iceberg in recorded history broke away from the Ross ice shelf in Antarctica in 2000, Jill decided to explore inside it. It wasn't just so she could reach a historic diving milestone. It was also a huge scientific opportunity for Jill and her colleagues to learn about climate change. Listen to Jill describe what it was like to dive under the caves in her own words.”
Divernet: “Another hit-and-run boat incident has left a scuba diver injured, this time in Florida. The incident occurred about 1.5km off Oakland Park, which lies between Fort Lauderdale and Pompano Beach on the Atlantic coast, at around 2pm on 1 March. The unnamed male diver had been surfacing from an 18m-deep dive and was reported to have raised an SMB or flag to indicate his presence.”
Dive Magazine: “A sperm whale recently freed from entanglement by the British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) has tragically died just a few days later. The whale had first been spotted on Thursday 27 February in the Sound of Raasay, a small channel between the eastern coast of the Isle of Skye and the smaller island of Raasay, located off the northwest coast of mainland Scotland.”
Few things capture the underwater atmosphere like the lighting effects from beams of sunlight, Alex Mustard describes a novel technique to produce them with your strobe.
Artificial Sunlight
By Alex Mustard
Beams of sunlight stretch down from the surface and paint dancing highlights across the seabed, it is part of the essential ambience of the underwater world and a favourite component of underwater photographs. But we don’t get this light in all conditions. It is a rare treat.
The obvious requirement is sunshine, but equally important is a smooth water surface. It does not need to be millpond flat, but must be unruffled by the wind. Gentle waves, on the smooth surface, act like a series of lenses refracting the sunlight into focused beams, which in shallow water draw the classic pattern of flecks of light on the seabed. When the wind blows it rips at the surface creating lots of tiny wavelets, the surface no-longer can focus light into clear beams and instead we see blurry patches of light on the sea bed.
So one of the challenges for the underwater photographer working in shallow water is to find these conditions. Some places are blessed windless conditions, freshwater is often much more protected than the sea. In other places we can find patches of calm, such as shelter from high cliffs or a large dive boat, which can create a small area of perfect light.
The angle of the sun also changes the nature of the light. When it is overhead the beams will penetrate deepest into the water column in a tightly focus sunball. As the sun drops low in the sky, so the sunball is spread out, with the sunbeams refracted over several waves, creating rows of beams. Because the sun is at a low angle these beams…
This week’s Instagram Spotlight features the photography of Álvaro Herrero known in the underwater photography world as Mekan. Mekan was recently named Underwater Photographer of the Year 2025 for his shot of a mother humpback whale and calf. Check out his portfolio and give him a follow.
Summary
That’s it for this edition of Inside Scuba! We hope you enjoyed the insights from Alex Mustard and our conversation with Roger Munns. Stay tuned for our next issue, where we’ll bring you more expert advice, inspiring stories, and the latest in underwater photography and diving. In the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts with us—we always love hearing from our readers. Until next time, dive safe and keep capturing the magic beneath the surface!
Andy & Byron
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