It’s like candy for your workflow.

These are my first reactions to the Radiopopper flash communication extender accessory thing-a-ma-jig. I plan to do an updated review in a few months after I’ve beat them up prison style and made ‘m my flash slaves. The comments are based on my use for just these two separate photo shoots with a total of about 300 exposures.The two images here were taken with the aid of the Radiopopper.

As you may have seen in this video, I received my Radio Poppers last Thursday. First, first impression: Nice and tiny. It came with industrial Velcro and even a slab of gaffers tape. I can just see Kevin (I don’t actually know what he looks like, but I can imagine) sitting there staring through his coke bottle glasses surrounded by tech stolen from area 52, scratching his six-pack abs, pushing his albino dreads back over his horribly super-sized cranium, swearing off food or drink, mumbling to his concerned followers, “No, I’ve still got 3,268 more squares of gaffers tape to cut.” Well, with what these little critters do, I’m afraid you’re going to be cutting lots more of that sticky black stuff.

Bottom line: Radiopopper - it does exactly what it’s supposed to. Maybe you don’t know or understand what that is. So briefly… it makes your Canon or Nikon flashes do what you probably thought they did when you first bought them, talk to each other so you didn’t have to do all the talking. If that doesn’t make sense, go to the radiopopper site and you’ll see what I mean.

They work. Oh, I already said that. I know, it’s frustrating that you have to buy yet another camera accessory to make what you already bought do what it should already have done, but once you get over that passionate anger at Canon and Nikon, you’ll probably want to send candy hearts to the Radiopopper folk.

Now, just to make it clear, I don’t use TTL, ETTL, or ROTFL, I like to shoot manual. So why bother with radiopoppers? Well, now I can put a flash in the shower, in another room, on another floor, in a car, wherever and not have to run over and unpack it to adjust the brightness. I can dial it in all from the 580ex flash on my camera. This saves me a massive amount of creative energy. I can stay focused on getting what I want out of the images and not on running around making slight power adjustments.

Any Popper Problems? Nothing serious. I did notice when I walked with the transmitter on the camera in front of one of the flashes with a receiver, the flash would sometimes drip out a little flash pop. Not a problem, but weird. It was never a bright flash, just an itty bitty one. Every time I wanted the flash to fire, it did. Well, except for once. On one shoot I did find that if I laid the flash on the floor (to shoot under a bed in a room down the hall from the room I was shooting in) the flash would not always fire. It had a blinky link light so popper was warning me that I had found some sort of Bermuda Triangle of a radio vacuum. As soon as the flash was a foot off the ground I got a steady link light. And just to check, the same flash on the floor in another room worked fine. That’s it? No other problems? Well not with reliability. However…

I really, I mean really don’t like that you have to unscrew the cute little bugger every time you want to change the battery. I know, they sip juice like it’s bathwater, but it still makes me coo-coo bananas. Fortunately this is an easy fix. At some point hopefully RP will offer a replacement back cover with a slip off battery cover (PLEASE!). I’m also not a fan of the “Tape It To My Flash” idea. You Velcro the receiver to the flash, but you tape the light transmitting doodad (to use a technical term) over the flash sensor. Uh, you do? Yep. I don’t like it. It works great, but I don’t want to put tape on my flash and worse, every time I want to pack up my flash I have to untape it. That’s not how I do things. UPDATE: I have come up with a SUPER easy mod to fix this issue. You can read how to do it on the Radiopopper Mod Post.

Hopefully this is another thing that will get ironed out soon. Perhaps a little suction cup that mounts the doo-dad to the flash so I can quickly set up and tear down. If they don’t offer one, I’ll have to DIY it.

There’s no way I’m going to finish a gig and watch Suzanne Somers, Gordon Sumner, and Sumner Redstone chatting away about what a brilliant photographer I am, finishing off the apple pie and ice cream in the hot tub with my assistant while I’m pealing gaffers tape off of my flashes. Never again!

I have to give Radiopopper a HUGE “way to go”. They did what suckers said can’t be done. I’ll still use my Pocket Wizards for my studio strobes, but I can’t imagine ever using them with my 580ex flashes again. And I haven’t even started using the high speed sync! More on that in the update. Nice.

Update: Strobist has mentioned this article. And the Radiopopper site now has a page where they are listing reviews of the poppers including this one. Thanks guys!

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