DISQUS

Sorry for not being clear. Here's a good article on HSS that explains it better and in much more detail: http://www.rpphoto.com/howto/view.asp?articleID...

That's true, but if you use a faster shutter speed, you'll need to open up the aperture to compensate for the light loss of using the HSS mode which balances everything out. If you keep the aperture stopped down and also increase your shutter speed, the sky will indeed get darker but the flash output will be equally lower since you lose about a stop of flash power for every stop of shutter speed you go beyond the camera's x-sync.

I wish it didn't work this way since I'd love to be able to overpower the sun from a distance with a single speedlight, but the only way to do this is to use more flashes or use a camera with an electronic shutter that's capable of syncing at higher speeds without forcing the flash to go into HSS mode (my Canon G9 point-n-shoot can sync up to about 1/640 or 1/800 when using a radio trigger, although it's not 100% reliable). Of course, you can still overpower the sun if you're lighting a small area from a close distance and zoom the flash head to 105mm (or even use one of those Better Beamer things), but lighting a large group from a distance requires different equipment. Maybe now with the RadioPoppers, it will be possible to use two zoomed HSS flashes to light up a large group with one on either side of the camera. This would be pretty much impossible in bright light with the IR/light pulse slave system.

Sorry, I don't think I was 100% clear. There's no real gain in power when switching to high speed sync. If you're shooting at f/2.8 in the sun, then you'll need to compensate by increasing your shutter speed to about 1/8000 which will cut the power of the flash output by about 5 stops due to the strobe action of HSS mode (and in effect, balances with the much wider aperture). This won't help you overpower the sun, but it does give you many more options in the available apertures you can use.

As for David's photo, the flash is only about 1-2 feet away from the subject and at that distance it's very easy to overpower the sun. Sorry, I hope this doesn't sound argumentative, I just don't want people to get the wrong impression of what is possible with the RPs and be disappointed.

I don't think the high speed sync option will help to overpower the sun, since most hotshoe flashes that I know of drop drastically in power once you enable HSS (I've found it's about equivalent to one stop loss for every increased stop in shutter speed, so it pretty much balances out when trying to overpower the ambient). One nice thing about it is that we won't have to shoot at f/16 or /f22 with wireless flash in the sun anymore. You could always use two or more flashes with Radio Poppers for more sun-killing power though (and this should be much more feasible with the Radio Poppers since it's tough enough to get just one IR flash to fire in bright sun).