Welcome to Issue #64 of Inside Scuba

In Issue #64 of Inside Scuba, we're going off the grid — literally. Our Deep Dive ditches the compass for real-world navigation tricks: reading terrain, tracking the sun, and building a mental map before you even hit the water. We've also got a hands-on look at Backscatter's new OS-3 Optical Snoot for dramatic macro lighting, Alex Mustard's return to Fiji's underrated soft coral reefs on the Underwater Photography Show, jaw-dropping footage from NOAA's deep-sea ROV expedition off Hawai'i, and a full roundup of the latest dive news — from gear recalls to a submersible dive on Shackleton's lost ship.

What’s happening in this edition?

• A Real Diver's Guide to Underwater Navigation
• Dive News
• Backscatter OS-3 Optical Snoot Review: Precision Lighting for Lembeh's Black Sand
• Why Fiji Should Be on Every Underwater Photographer's Radar
• New Deep Sea ROV Encounters Near Hawai'i
• Summary

🌴 Solomon Islands Photography Workshop — Week 1 Still Open

Our 10-night liveaboard expedition to the Solomon Islands sold out within a day of publishing it on the website — so we've added a second departure. Week 1 (16–26 September) still has cabins available. Week 2 is sold out, but you can join the waitlist and we'll reach out if a spot opens up.

See the full itinerary and book →

A Real Diver's Guide to Underwater Navigation

My partner Lauren is a fabulous dive buddy, she makes me enjoy my diving so much. It’s a pleasure to be in the water with her, it’s fun, relaxed and makes me laugh every time I dive with her. We met through diving, and have been diving together ever since, much of our conversations are about diving and underwater photography and our entire social scene is filled with other divers we have met along our journey. There are many fabulous reasons we are dating, but I think it is fair to say I am not dating her for her underwater navigational skills.

Whilst I love to dive with Lauren, if I left the navigation to her then we would have been lost at sea years ago. Even to this day we can go for a one-hour dive, I’ll bring her back to right underneath the boat, I’ll signal to her “where is the boat?” and she will look puzzled and confused and signal that she doesn’t know — to which I just point up above her to the boat that is 15ft (4.6 m) above her head.

This article is primarily for Lauren, but also for anyone else who struggles to know where they are underwater and how to always get back to the boat. Now remember, these are my opinions and my methods. Will they be written in the next PADI Open Water course? No — but these are the tricks I always deploy to ensure I always know where I am. These are the techniques that I learnt when I was a guide, and when I was the one the others were looking to for the answer when they asked where the boat is.

On Holiday Dives in Tropical Locations, Forget the Compass

Every entry level course teaches the same routine. Face a landmark, note the heading on a compass, count your kicks to a turnaround point, reverse the heading, count the same number of kicks back. It is a fine drill for a swimming pool with zero current and a tiled floor that never changes shape. In open water it falls apart within the first few seconds of a real dive.

You rarely swim in a straight line underwater, and if you did it would be the most boring dive of your life. Instead, we swim between structures and points of interest looking to explore as we go. The only way a compass works if you know the bearings you swam out in the first place to be able to come back the same way. But it is better to dive in a fluid way with knowledge of your surroundings instead of constantly looking at a largely useless compass.

The only time I use a compass is for shore diving at home; that is because I am leaving a beach and want to return exactly to the same beach, and the visibility underwater is usually 3ft (1 m) or less. When the viz is this bad, the compass is the go-to tool, as you can’t have any visual reference of key features underwater.

So, if I am not using a compass, how do I do it?

Read more…

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.

Backscatter OS-3 Optical Snoot Review: Precision Lighting for Lembeh’s Black Sand

When I reviewed the Backscatter HF-1 strobe last year, I tested it across three very different environments: the bright reefs of Cuba, my own frigid backyard in Iceland, and the muck of Lembeh, Indonesia. At the time, I noted that the HF-1 was clearly built for wide-angle shooters chasing sharks and sunballs, and that its macro performance, while perfectly capable, was really waiting on one missing piece — a dedicated snoot. Backscatter hadn’t released one yet, and I said as much in that review: the HF-1 would only get better once accessories like a snoot arrived.

That piece has now arrived. The Optical Snoot OS-3 is Backscatter’s answer for turning the Hybrid Flash’s enormous, wide and powerful beam into something you can point at a single eye, a single antenna, or a single patch of skin the size of a grain of rice.

What a snoot actually is, and why you’d want one

A snoot is a light-shaping accessory that clips or bayonets onto the front of a strobe and narrows its beam down from a wide flood into a tight spotlight. Instead of lighting your subject and everything around it, a snoot lets you light only the subject, sometimes only part of the subject, and lets the background fall into pure black or a nice blue ambient-lit background.

The reason this matters comes down to what macro subjects actually look like against their environment. A huge number of the best subjects in muck diving — hairy frogfish, juvenile batfish, Ambon scorpionfish, shrimp gobies, and tiny nudibranchs — all sit directly on rubble or plain black sand. Light that whole scene evenly with a standard strobe and diffuser, and you get an accurate but flat photograph: subject and background both correctly exposed, both competing for the viewer’s eye, and often a background full of distracting debris.

A snoot solves this by cutting the light off before it reaches anything but the animal. The background disappears into black, the subject appears to glow out of nowhere, and you get the dramatic, almost studio-lit look that separates a competition macro image from a documentary record shot.

Snoots also solve a second, less obvious problem: camouflage. A lot of the most sought-after muck subjects are camouflaged specifically to blend into cluttered backgrounds. Stonefish, Ambon scorpionfish, and various species of frogfish are textbook examples. They have evolved to disappear against rubble and natural sponges. Flood light across the whole frame and the subject can genuinely get lost in the photograph the same way it’s lost to the naked eye. A tight beam lifts it cleanly off the background and does the opposite of what camouflage is designed to do.

The tradeoff has always been control. Aiming a narrow beam of light onto something the size of a nudibranch, underwater, while neutrally buoyant, while the current pushes you gently sideways, is hard. This is exactly the problem Backscatter has been iterating on across three generations of snoot, and it’s where the OS-3 makes its case.

Read more…

Why Fiji Should Be on Every Underwater Photographer's Radar

By Alex Mustard and Matthew Sullivan

Drawn from a recent episode of The Underwater Photography Show, this article shares what Alex Mustard discovered on a return to Fiji after nearly a decade away — and why he believes it's one of the most underrated wide-angle destinations in the Indo-Pacific.

Getting There: Easier Than You Think

The first thing worth saying about Fiji is that the travel is far less daunting than its position on the map might suggest. And I (Alex) say that coming from the UK — essentially the opposite side of the world — I found it surprisingly smooth. Bags checked in London, no dramas, collected in Fiji without issue, and the same on the way back. Major airline to major airline, no unusual check-in situations, no unfamiliar airport queues, no middle of the night flights. It was a lot of hours in a seat, but it was easy, say compared with getting to Raja Ampat.

For anyone on the US West Coast, or in Australia or New Zealand, the case is a lot, lot stronger. Direct flights run from Vancouver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to Fiji, which is genuinely a rare treat for a tropical Indo-Pacific destination. There are not many places where you can board a single flight from a major hub and arrive somewhere with world-class reef diving. That alone should put Fiji considerably higher on people's lists than it currently sits.

The Reef Diving: A Cut Above

What the Nai'a itinerary does brilliantly is offer a genuinely rounded coral reef experience. Yes, Fiji is famously the soft coral capital of the world, and that reputation is well-earned — but what I hadn't fully appreciated until this trip is how amazing that colour is compared to other destinations.

The soft corals are predominantly Dendronephthya and Scelronephthya species, and they are nearly all strongly, vividly coloured individuals. You're not looking at the dull purpley-brown colonies that often don't translate well to photographs. These are oranges, reds, bright pinky-purples, rich deep purples — and there is a lot of them, absolutely everywhere. The sea fans are the same. In Raja Ampat you get plenty of the Melithaea fans — nice, but in Fiji the same genus is much more richly hued, with golds and poster reds. The Annella fans, which in the Red Sea tend toward a pale orangey-beige, are Ferrari red in Fiji. Just boom — a completely different impact.

Read more…

We spend so much of our time looking down — at reefs, at critters, at the sandy bottom — that it's easy to forget how little we actually know about what lies far beneath us. NOAA's latest ROV expedition off Hawai'i is a timely reminder. Conducted in May and early June 2026 aboard NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer, the dives sent cameras down into deep, remote habitats that almost no one has ever seen — and the creatures they encountered are, to put it mildly, extraordinary. This is the kind of footage that puts the whole diving experience in perspective. We go deep. NOAA goes really deep. Check it out.

Summary

That's a wrap on Issue #64 — we hope it gave you plenty to think about on your next dive, whether that's finally ditching the compass or picking up a snoot. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a dive buddy who'd love it too. Until next time, happy bubbles!

Andy & Byron