A big welcome to everyone who's recently joined us from Underwater Photography Magazine — glad to have you aboard. This issue dives into the thought process behind strobe positioning for wide angle shooting, puts the new Retra Maxi strobe through a long-term review, and sits down with printer Jason Bradley to talk about getting your images off the screen and onto paper. We'll also drift through the kelp forests of British Columbia in this week's video highlight. And a quick reminder: all 150 issues of Underwater Photography Magazine are now indexed and fully searchable at uwp-archive.insidescuba.online, so if you're chasing down an old article, it's never been easier to find.

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When I am teaching underwater photography workshops, I am always keen to avoid teaching people how to shoot one very specific photo in one very specific location at one very specific time of day. Instead, I prefer to teach people to assess a scene, understand it, and make decisions on strobe position and power that let them take the image they want.

The true measure of success for students from a workshop isn't whether they get good images on the trip — it's actually when they go on their next trip with no instructor, in a new environment with new scenery to shoot. If they can go on to capture great photos again, that is true success, as it shows an understanding of the teachings and an ability to calmly work through a thought process in any situation, coming away from the dives with great images.

Ask five underwater photographers how far apart their strobes should sit and you will likely get five different answers. Ask them why, and the good ones will not quote a formula. They will describe the scene they were shooting: the clarity of the water, the subject, the light, the shot they were after. That is the real skill in wide angle lighting. It is not a setting you dial in once and forget. It is a habit of reading a scene and responding to it, again and again, dive after dive.

Most guides to underwater lighting hand you a starting arrangement: strobes out at roughly forty-five degrees, arms raised above the housing, aimed just past the front of the dome and on half power. It is a reasonable place to begin, and every diver should know it. The trouble starts when that arrangement gets treated as the answer rather than a starting point. Water clarity varies enormously, from a rinsed-out blue water dive to a green, particulate-heavy bay. Subjects range from a pale, reflective fish to a dark, matte lava boulder to a diver in a black wetsuit. Ambient light shifts with depth, time of day, and surface conditions. A fixed setup that flatters one of these scenes will very often fail the next one, producing backscatter, blown highlights, muddy shadows, or a subject that simply looks flat and lifeless. The photographers who consistently come home with strong wide angle images are not the ones who found the perfect preset. They are the ones who stopped looking for one.

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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.

Retra Underwater Technology very generously provided me with a pair of their new Maxi strobes for evaluation. I've been shooting the Backscatter HF-1 for over a year now and have publicly made comparisons with Retra's strobes. To be perfectly honest, I have been critical of Retra's highest-end Pro Max and Pro Max II strobes due to their relatively high price compared to the HF-1 and their use of older AA battery technology. I consider AA power cells outdated in the lithium-ion era, resulting in limitations to core features like recycling time, video lighting, and run-time.

The new Maxi strobe seems to have answers to each of these critiques. I appreciate their confidence in allowing me to consider their new product.

It is an exciting time in the underwater photography market, with a lot of new lighting options showing up over the last two years. Backscatter started this momentum with their HF-1 high-power, wide-angle strobes. Adopting lithium-ion batteries in a market long dominated by AA-powered cells, the HF-1 brought a new set of capabilities to shooters: longer battery life, much faster recycle times, higher-power flashes, and 5000-lumen video lights, all in one package.

Starting in January 2026, the HF-1 got new competition when Retra Underwater Technology began shipping their new Retra Maxi underwater strobe. The Maxi meets or exceeds the HF-1 on most of the spec-sheet line items. It uses the same 21700 high-draw lithium-ion batteries. The Maxi provides an (optional) 6000-lumen video light. And it is compatible with Retra's range of accessories and add-ons like the LSD snoot, color filters, and reduction rings. Best of all, there is no more reliance on a massive set of 16 (or even more with spares) AA batteries and chargers needed to support two strobes on a dive trip.

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In this article from The Underwater Photography Show, we'll be diving into printing — I sat down with Jason Bradley of Bradley Print & Photo, one of the most respected underwater photography printers around, based in Monterey, California, to talk through everything from file prep to paper choice. Matthew, who normally co-hosts, was out sick for this one, so it's just me and Jason working through a topic I'm happy to admit is one area of underwater photography where I don't have all the answers — getting our images off the screen and onto something we can actually hold: printing.

Jason has an interesting path into printing. He never set out to become an expert printer — he set out to be a photographer, and still considers himself one first. But years of teaching digital workflow and leading trips (which is how we originally crossed paths) morphed into offering printing services to his students, which over time grew into running his own print lab.

I wanted to start broad: why does printing matter at all in a world where most of our images live on screens? Jason's answer was firm — he believes printing is the single most important phase of any photographer's workflow, regardless of genre. It forces a kind of scrutiny you don't get scrolling through files on a laptop. When you decide an image is good enough to print, hang on a wall, and show people, you have to sift through your archive with a much more critical eye than you would when just prepping something for social media or email. You start noticing things — how your colour is rendering, how your technique holds up under real scrutiny — and that feedback loop is essential if you want to keep improving. Hang a substandard picture on your wall, and those rough edges will be there to remind you, every day.

Printing intimidates a lot of underwater photographers, and I put that to Jason directly: where should someone start if they've never prepped a file for print before? His advice was to focus on two things — details and consistency.

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Our Video of the Week takes us into the towering kelp forests of British Columbia, one of the most biodiverse cold-water ecosystems anywhere in the ocean. These swaying underwater forests support an entire community of life — rockfish weaving through the canopy, nudibranchs tucked into the fronds, and the occasional giant Pacific octopus keeping watch from below — and the footage captures just how alive and otherworldly a kelp forest feels from underneath. It's a great reminder that some of the richest diving out there doesn't require warm water or a passport. Check it out.

That wraps up Issue #66. As always, if you enjoyed what you read, send it along to a dive buddy who'd get a kick out of it too — and remember, all 150 issues of Underwater Photography Magazine are now indexed and searchable at uwp-archive.insidescuba.online, so past wisdom is only a search away. Until next time, happy bubbles!

Andy & Byron