Welcome to Issue #68 of Inside Scuba
In Issue #68 of Inside Scuba, we head to Egypt's Red Sea for a sobering deep dive on the Salem Express, a wreck that's as much a grave as a dive site. This edition also doubles as a photographer's toolkit — we break down how to build depth into your underwater images with backgrounds, lighting and leading lines, and Alex Mustard tackles the unglamorous but essential question of how to manage your ever-growing photo archive. Add a documentary-worthy look at the giant Pacific octopus and the latest dive news from around the world, and there's plenty to sink your teeth into this issue.
What’s happening in this edition?
Diving the Salem Express: Egypt's Red Sea Grave
I have lost count of how many times I have flown into Hurghada or Sharm over the years, kit bag over one shoulder, camera housing over the other, shooting oceanic whitetip sharks off Elphinstone or drifting the walls at Ras Mohammed. Egypt has been a second home to my diving life for over 10 years. And yet, until this trip, there was one wreck I had never laid eyes on, despite it sitting barely an hour's boat ride from Safaga and despite being one of the most well-known wrecks in the entire Red Sea.
The Salem Express is not famous for the reasons a wreck usually is. It is not a war grave from some distant, half mythologized conflict, nor a cargo ship that slipped anchor in a storm nobody remembers. It sank in 1991, within living memory of the guides and captains who take you out to it, and it did so with hundreds of people still aboard.
The Salem Express Passenger Ferry
A Ferry That Should Never Have Been Where It Was
To understand why this wreck carries the weight it does, you have to go back to what the Salem Express actually was. She began her working life in 1966 as a French-built ferry named the Fred Scamaroni, shuttling passengers between Marseille and Corsica in the Mediterranean. She changed hands and names more than once over the following two decades, as aging ferries often do, before an Egyptian company bought her in 1988 and put her to work on a very different, and far more grueling, route: the 450-mile (724 km) crossing between Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, and Safaga, on Egypt's Red Sea coast.
That route mattered enormously to the people who used it. It was, and still is, one of the main sea corridors for pilgrims traveling to and from Mecca, particularly around the Hajj and Umrah seasons, alongside migrant workers and their families moving between the two countries. Tickets were cheap relative to flying, and demand from returning pilgrims in December 1991 was intense.
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.
Safety & Incidents
Divernet: "Eight divers rescued in Malta, death in USA. Eight overseas divers were swept from shore by strong currents near Malta's Rozi wreck and safely recovered in a multi-agency rescue; the same day, an 80-year-old diver died following a medical emergency aboard a wreck-diving charter off New Jersey."
DAN: "Bitten by Bonitos. A diver recounts being bitten through the lip and chin by fast-moving striped bonitos during a frenzied baitball encounter while snorkeling in Mexico's Magdalena Bay, and credits quick coordination between her liveaboard crew and DAN with getting her into emergency reconstructive surgery within hours — she was back diving 30 days later."
The Scuba News: "Diver Expected to Recover After Shark Bite off Pensacola. A 40-year-old spearfisherman is expected to fully recover after a shark bit both his forearms roughly 30 nautical miles off Florida, with quick first aid from his dive buddies and a Coast Guard evacuation credited with saving him."
Conservation
Divernet: "Divers' shark rescue prompts ghost-gear appeal. Two bull huss sharks were freed from a lost crab pot off Cornwall by a wildlife trust diver and a photojournalist, prompting a renewed call for divers to report abandoned fishing gear that can trap marine life for weeks."
Divernet: "Diver targets rats in bid to save Snake Island. A conservationist is leading an effort to eradicate invasive rats from Indonesia's remote Manuk Island — nicknamed Snake Island for its sea kraits — to protect the seabirds and reptiles that make it a prized expeditionary dive site."
Mongabay: "Spain proposes 23 new marine protected areas in the Canary Islands and Mediterranean. Spain has opened public consultation on 23 new marine protected areas covering more than 22,000 sq km of Canary Islands and Mediterranean waters, aiming to safeguard reefs, seagrass and submarine canyons as part of its 2030 ocean-protection targets."
Wrecks & Underwater Archaeology
Divernet: "Salvor's sale of Titanic passenger belongings blocked. A US federal judge has halted a planned auction of 361 Titanic artifacts, including jewelry and personal effects, after widespread objections over the sale of items recovered directly from the wreck site."
Freediving
Divernet: "'My longest dive': Molchanov sets two CMAS world records. Alexey Molchanov set two new CMAS freediving records in Roatán — a 133m Free Immersion dive and a 127m Constant Weight Bi-Fins dive that took over five minutes and that he called the longest dive of his career."
Gear & Technology
Backscatter: "The Best Underwater Strobes Tested 2026. Backscatter put more than twenty underwater strobes through identical lab and in-water testing, comparing brightness, beam pattern, recycle time, color temperature, weight, and flash duration to give divers a genuine apples-to-apples buying guide, plus an interactive tool for comparing beam patterns side by side."
DIVE Magazine: "DJI launches Osmo 360 II with 8K/60fps video and replaceable lenses. DJI has released the second generation of its 360-degree action camera, adding higher frame rates, improved low-light processing and replaceable lenses."
Business Standard: "India gets its first indigenous diving equipment brand. Bengaluru-based Planet Scuba India has launched iNDiC, billed as the country's first indigenous diving equipment brand, covering rebreathers, dive propulsion vehicles and life-support systems built initially for the Indian Armed Forces."
Industry, Policy & Training
Divernet: "Florida dive operators voice concerns to Congress. South Florida dive-store owners, dive-boat operators and DEMA representatives met with Congresswoman Lois Frankel on August 26 to raise concerns over spiking vessel insurance premiums, import tariffs on dive equipment and rising fuel costs — citing NOAA data showing dive tourism generates over $900 million annually and supports nearly 8,700 jobs in southeast Florida alone."
Divernet: "DEEP teams up with DDRC for Diver Medic Technician course. DEEP, the company behind the Vanguard subsea habitat, has partnered with DDRC Healthcare to launch a Diver Medic Technician course this winter, training divers to handle in-water medical emergencies."
How to Create Depth in Underwater Photography: Backgrounds, Lighting, and Leading Lines
Depth is one of the most overlooked ingredients in underwater photography. I hear almost nobody speaking about it, and you see almost no written articles about it. Even when people are discussing images, they don’t discuss the depth in the photo, but what do I actually mean when I say “depth”?
Here is the pattern I see constantly, in my own early work as much as in workshops I run for other divers. A subject is found, usually something colorful and cooperative, and it gets lit evenly and squarely from the front. The strobes are dialed in so the foreground glows, the exposure looks technically correct on the back of the camera, and everyone is happy. Except the background behind that subject is either pure black or a featureless wall of blue, and there is nothing in the frame to tell the eye how far away anything is or give any sense of scale. The result looks like a cutout pasted onto a color swatch rather than a photograph taken inside a three-dimensional world. It is properly exposed and completely flat.
Creating depth in your image means having a photo that draws you through the scene, from the front of the image just in front of the lens all the way into the background. It makes the viewer look across the scene and constantly get drawn through it as the image is layered, often with foregrounds, mid sections and backgrounds. There are many ways to do this, though, and below are the techniques I often use both in wide angle and macro. Many of these tricks I could write a whole article on, but this is a short summary of a variety of techniques to get you thinking about depth next time you go shooting.
Blue water, sunbeams, silhouettes, schooling fish, and a lit foreground all add up to create depth and layers.
Storage Strategies: How to Manage Your Underwater Photography Archive
By Alex Mustard with Matthew Sullivan
In this article adapted from The Underwater Photography Show, we tackle a question that came in from several listeners at the same time: how do you handle mass storage for underwater images, especially now that high-resolution cameras are eating up hard drive space faster than ever? Alex delves into the topic.
Start With a Few Home Truths
I want to start this with a few key questions, because if you answer them honestly, the storage problem is much less of a problem.
First, there's only so much time in your life for processing images. How many do you properly process? You might process a couple hundred pictures a year. Accept that and keeping many hundreds of times that number doesn't make much sense. I do think processing is going to change a lot in the next three or four years, with AI likely taking over a good chunk of Lightroom's role, pre-identifying and even pre-processing images based on how we like to work. Allowing us to process more. So there's an argument for keeping a bit more than you'll immediately process. But keeping 30 versions of the same shot is still silly, especially now that high-resolution, high-frame-rate cameras are monsters for eating up hard drives.
Second, what was the reason you took 30 pictures of a subject? It probably wasn't because you wanted 30 pictures — it's because you wanted one great shot, and you shot 30 to be sure, hoping something in the scene might happen to make one frame stand out. If you got that shot, then you probably don't need the other 29. And if nothing changed and all 30 are basically the same, then you also only need to keep one!
Third, does your audience want to see all 30 pictures? They want to see your best work. Even with winning images where you have 29 technically excellent similars, there is little point in keeping them all.
Our Video of the Week takes us deep into the world of one of the ocean's most intelligent inhabitants: the giant Pacific octopus. This documentary-style feature explores what makes these animals so remarkable — their problem-solving intelligence, uncanny camouflage, and behaviors that still surprise researchers who've studied them for years. The cinematography is genuinely stunning, with crisp 4K footage capturing details you'd rarely catch on a typical dive. Whether you've had your own octopus encounter or only seen them in photos, it's a great reminder of just how alien and fascinating life beneath the surface can be. Check it out.
Summary
That's a wrap on Issue #68 — we hope the Salem Express gave you something to think about on your next wreck dive, and that the photography tips find their way into your next shoot. If you enjoyed this issue, please share it with a fellow diver who'd love it too. Until next time, happy bubbles!
Andy & Byron