Using the Radiopopper PX system let me achieve High Speed Sync effortlessly.

This image was taken on a clear sky day with the on full power.  Camera was set to F4 and 1/1000 at ISO 200.  The flash is a bare SB800 hung in the tree holding up the feeder. Without the HSS the exposure was way to bright in the background because it was so bright out. Radiopoppers and HSS allowed me to run up the shutter speed high enough to eliminate a lot of the ambient light and correctly expose the birds and the feeder.  I used manual flash power control via the Nikon CLS Commander.   I was limited to 1/1000 because that’s all I can figure out how to get my light meter to go to.   The Radiopopper was happy to go faster.

The HSS advantage here was that it was really, really bright sunlight when the birds where out. I hung the SB800 in the tree behind lots of leaves and branches and stuff. I shot from quite distance away (skittish little bird these are) and the dang things fired flawlessly. There is no way I could have gotten this with regular FP HSS because of the light, leaves, and distance. In fact, I think it works pretty much the same way (not sure of that) but somehow gets even higher speed than the FP sync says it can go on the settings page…

I’m no expert on this HSS thing. It’s still a kind of magic to me but I like the results.

These two were shot was at 5.6 and 1/500 and ISO 200.