In Issue #70 of Inside Scuba, Byron makes the case for shooting what you don't love — black and white, fake backgrounds, snoots, and wildly different edits of the same frame — and explains why every failed experiment teaches you something about light. We also head to Vancouver Island for a big sockeye year, hauling gear through the woods to photograph salmon in rushing rivers, deep pools, and even under a waterfall, while Alex Mustard reports back from Grand Cayman on Sony A7RVI battery life, a fisheye test, and evening hamlet spawning. Add the latest dive news and a Video of the Week that drops a freediver into Mexico's sardine run, and there's plenty to sink into this issue.

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There are many images on my hard drive that I rarely show anyone.

They are photographs I took on purpose, but I didn't like them when I shot them, and I still don't particularly like them today. There are black-and-white shots of reef scenes that never quite came together, macro subjects lit against strange colored backgrounds, blurry experiments with slow shutter speeds, and a whole collection of heavily stylized edits that look nothing like the rest of my work. If you scrolled through them, you might wonder what on earth I was thinking. The truth is, these images have taught me more about underwater photography than almost anything else I have ever shot.

When I run workshops, I see the same pattern again and again. Photographers arrive with a style they love, and they spend every dive chasing it. They are in their comfort zone; they have found something that works, and they stick to it religiously. There is nothing wrong with that. Knowing what you love is a huge part of developing as a photographer. But if you only ever shoot the thing you love, you only ever learn the lessons that one style has to teach you, and sooner or later you will stop improving, and you will also stop liking your own images.

This article is about giving yourself permission to shoot things you don't feel passionate about. To try styles you may never use in a portfolio. To edit a single image five different ways, knowing most of them will end up in the bin. Not because the results will be amazing, but because every one of those experiments will teach you something about light, and light is the one thing that connects every style of photography you will ever attempt.

Underwater photography is really a study of light in a hostile environment. Water absorbs color, scatters light, reduces contrast, and steals sharpness with every meter you shoot through. Whether you are photographing a manta ray in open water or a tiny shrimp on a sea pen, you are wrestling with exactly the same physics. The distance between your strobe and the subject, the angle at which the light hits it, the way the ambient light behaves at depth, and how quickly your light falls off into the background are all part of every single frame.

The problem is that when we shoot the same style every time, we stop noticing these things. We find a setup that works, we lock in our strobe positions and our settings, and we stop asking why it works. That is comfortable, and comfortable is where growth goes to die.

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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.

Every autumn, salmon return from the ocean to the rivers and streams where they were born. Salmon run every year, but the big sockeye runs come every four years, and 2026 was one of those years. Five of us spent a week on Vancouver Island in British Columbia to experience and photograph this incredible event.

We rented an Airbnb in Campbell River as our base for the week. A good friend who grew up on Vancouver Island served as our guide. He knows the island exceptionally well and took us to his favorite secret spots around the area. We also squeezed in three ocean dives during the week, but the salmon are the main focus of this article.

Fall on Vancouver Island can be rainy, but we didn't see a drop all week, and most days were filled with sunshine. We got to work in a wide variety of environments, from salmon pushing through rapidly moving water to large, deep pools full of schooling fish, and we saw several species, including chinook, pink, and sockeye.

While we had plenty of salmon to photograph, we were probably a little early this year. The sockeye were still silver, just beginning to show the red and green they're known for.

This wasn't "drive up to the dive site, gear up, and go diving." At most sites, we had to hike our gear (cameras, scuba equipment, weights, and everything else) a good distance up and down through wooded terrain. We were on existing trails, but it was still a haul in both directions.

That made reconnaissance essential. Before committing to the hike with a full load, we'd visit each site to scout it: were the salmon there, and what were the conditions like?

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In this article from The Underwater Photography Show, we'll be diving into the gear from our 200th episode — Sony A7RVI battery life, a controversial fisheye lens test, and evening hamlet spawning dives in Grand Cayman.

This was my second trip with the Sony A7RVI, and it gave me the chance to properly conclude on the battery life underwater — something we didn't cover in our original review episode after the camera in the Red Sea. The A7RVI uses a new, slightly chunkier battery than previous Sony bodies, paired with power-saving features like an EVF that drops into a dark mode after a few seconds of inactivity. Together, these combine for an exciting big jump in real world battery performance.

For context: in the Red Sea, with a brand-new battery, I could do two short dives on the wreck of the Thistlegorm and still have 80% remaining — theoretically enough for ten dives on one charge. On a longer, 80-minute dive at Ras Mohammed shooting 250–300 images, the battery would drop to around 80% after just one dive. In Cayman, shooting three longer dives in a day, the battery comfortably lasted the full day — on one occasion sitting at 58% after three dives, a marked improvement over any other Sony body I've shot.

The battery is charged via USB-C and slots in easily to the new charger. The percentage readout is also better calibrated against real camera use, so the number shown is far more believable than on previous models. So far I have still been switching batteries at midday, really out of habit from having the A1.

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Our Video of the Week heads to Mexico for one of the ocean's great spectacles: the sardine run. When the sardines arrive, they pack together into shimmering bait balls, and the predators are never far behind. This film puts a freediver right in the middle of it all — no tanks, no bubbles, just one breath at a time and a front-row seat to the kind of feeding frenzy most of us only dream of seeing. Grab a coffee and check it out.

That's a wrap on Issue #70 — we hope it inspires you to try something new on your next dive, even if you don't love every frame. If you enjoyed this issue, please share it with a dive buddy who'd love it too. Until next time, happy bubbles!

Andy & Byron