High speed synch - Auto FP - Overpower the sun with 4 AA batteries

As a few of you may know, I’ve been getting very interested in the work done by some photographers using high speed synch. There are some great articles on it over at Strobist and I’ll try not to repeat it too much here.  This article will give you some tips on how to have almost total control over your lighting even in a bright and photographically speaking, potentially boring afternoon.  It will allow you to get the ambient exposure you want and help make your subject pop from the page.  (Or put another way, how you can pretend to over power the sun with 4 AA's, at least for a fraction of a second)

Not having any people to photograph , I went down to the Lakeshore this afternoon to test out a few theories and get a handle on how this could work for me.  In spite of a few snide remarks and some chuckles from passerby, I took a view of the horizon and used a lamp post as my stand in for a person.  Keep in mind these were all done on a nice sunny day around 4pm.

Top pic - P mode:  As you can see in this photo, the full auto and no flash with spot metering gives a decent, boring lighting of the post.  Notice how the sky is blown out though.

Centre pic - The camera was in manual mode at f7.1 , 1/3200 and ISO200.  In this pic, no flash was used as I wanted to get the skyline set the way I wanted as it was almost 4pm in the afternoon.  See how you get details in the clouds but the post is dark.  Without Auto FP, you could never synch with shutter speed this fast.

Bottom pic - Same settings as the centre one except I used the flash on iTTL, spot meter mode on the post (hey it was also my focus point), and the SB800 set to +3.0 (Keep in mind this is not the camera’s EV buttons, this on the flash only!  On the SB800 this is the + button on the strobe itself while the mode is TTL).http://www.flickr.com/photos/porterspixels/4612917721/in/photostream/
I was standing about 1 metre from the pole, strobe in left hand, camera in right.

A few notes that may be out there but worth repeating:

• You need to be very close to your subject when using high speed synch as the flash gun is pulsing in an effort to keep up with your shutter speed.  I was at about 4 feet (1.3 metres) from that pole.
•  Some photographers are using a head that allows you to carry as many as 3 strobes on the end of one light stand.  I used one here at 1.3M, 3 strobes would be better.  :) 
• A pocket wizard will not let you synch over around 1/2000 (I think, I may be wrong) but Nikon's CLS will if you change your Flash Synch Speed (Menu option e1) to Auto FP.  I'd be amazed if Canon did not have an option for this too, some where. 

What I really like about this technique is it only takes a few minutes to setup, and you can create much more dramatic portraits than you otherwise could.  You can see from the picture on the top how bright it was.  If you have some people to pose, I think the picture on the bottom would be a much edgier and make the person really pop.