In Issue #69 of Inside Scuba, we go looking for what fear actually means underwater, with a reflective piece on dread, comfort, and the sublime by guest author Gabriel Jensen. This edition is also a lighting masterclass for wreck photographers, breaking down how to get strobes and video lights off the camera on wrecks from Chuuk Lagoon to the Red Sea, plus Alex and Matthew discuss Backscatter's exhaustive new strobe test. Add the latest dive news from around the world and a Video of the Week from the wreck-strewn waters off North Carolina, and there's plenty here to get you thinking before your next dive.

There is a particular feeling that sometimes arrives underwater before we can attach a thought to it.

Breathing becomes conspicuous. The surrounding water suddenly feels larger, darker or less hospitable than it did a few seconds earlier. Nothing necessarily has gone wrong, but some involuntary part of the nervous system has reached a conclusion before the more articulate parts of the brain have caught up: something is wrong.

I think of that feeling as dread, and sooner or later most divers encounter some version of it. Diving culture, like most pursuits involving risk and adventure, has a complicated relationship with fear. We admire people who appear fearless, and we describe ourselves as becoming more comfortable underwater as we gain experience. A new diver apprehensive about descending into 30 feet (9 m) of clear water may eventually think nothing of a deep wreck, a night dive or floating over water so deep that the bottom has ceased to be relevant. But comfort and fearlessness are not the same thing, and I am not convinced that fearlessness is something divers should aspire to.

Experience can actually make our relationship with fear more complicated. We become capable of doing things that once frightened us while learning much more about what can go wrong. Our reactions aren't even particularly consistent. When a nine-foot (2.7 m) great white appeared on a dive, every sensible part of my brain knew to stay put and let it approach, while some considerably older part wanted to swim toward it. Yet looking into an abyss that poses no additional immediate danger can produce precisely the opposite response.

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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.

Wrecks are generally one of the biggest things we try to photograph underwater.

They are often enormous, and we forget that our humble little strobes are only really capable of lighting about 6ft (1.8 m) from the camera. When we're shooting wrecks we're trying to show the scale and grandeur of these bits of history, but throwing a little bit of light a long way onto these scenes has very little impact on our images, and that problem actually gets worse once we get inside a wreck and start trying to light long spaces such as corridors or rooms.

On land, nobody would light a subject the size of a bus by holding a torch above the camera and firing straight ahead. Underwater, that is exactly what most of us do when we start out, because on-camera strobes and video lights are simple, always pointed roughly where the camera is looking, and for a fish or a nudibranch a foot away, that is often good enough. Put that same light source in front of a hundred-metre wreck and the problem becomes obvious: a couple of lights glued to the camera can only light a tiny portion of what you see. It cannot show you the guns on a bow, the tanks on the deck, a motorbike deep inside a wreck. For that, the light has to leave the camera.

Before any of that makes sense, it helps to be clear about the two tools in question, because they behave in genuinely different ways underwater.

A strobe fires a single, extremely short burst of light, timed to coincide with your shutter opening. Because that burst is so brief, your shutter speed has almost no bearing on how much strobe light ends up in the photo, provided you stay at or below your camera's flash sync speed. What shutter speed does control, powerfully, is how much ambient light gets in around that flash: slow it down and the background blue brightens; speed it up and the background goes dark, even black, while the strobe-lit foreground barely changes. This is the trick behind the classic wreck photograph with a glowing blue background and a crisp, punchy subject in front.

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In this article from The Underwater Photography Show, we take a close look at Backscatter's newly published in-depth underwater strobe test — a project covering more than 20 strobes currently on the market.

This test took Backscatter well over a year to put together, and it shows. We were genuinely surprised at how little attention it's received in the community so far, which answers questions the community has been asking for years. About the only place we've seen it discussed at all is in a small thread of less than a dozen posts on Waterpixels. It should be generating more conversation!

Part of the apathy is probably timing. Three years ago, a huge portion of underwater shooters were still using previous-generation strobes — older Inons, Sea & Seas and other strobes — and in the years since, it seems to us that the majority of serious shooters have upgraded. Having spent the money, there's less appetite to go looking for reasons a newer strobe might be better. I know when I buy a new phone or laptop, I instantly stop reading the reviews!

But this is different. We'd encourage anyone with an interest in strobes to read through it. You don't need to focus on the comparative data, the written explainers are clear and genuinely improve your understanding of how strobes work and the issues that shape their performance.

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Our Video of the Week heads to the "Graveyard of the Atlantic" off Morehead City, North Carolina, where wartime wrecks like the U-352 and the SPAR still sit well within recreational depths. It's a good reminder that you don't need a liveaboard to the far Pacific to dive real history — some of the richest wreck diving anywhere is a short boat ride off the US East Coast. The footage captures exactly what makes these dives special: structure draped in soft coral, sand tiger sharks cruising the wreckage, and that particular thrill of swimming through a piece of maritime history. Worth adding to the list if you haven't made the trip yet.

That's a wrap on Issue #69 — we hope the piece on dread gave you something to sit with, and that the lighting tips find their way onto your next wreck dive. If you enjoyed this issue, please share it with a fellow diver who'd love it too. Until next time, happy bubbles!

Andy & Byron