Strobists may find this interesting

[ShutteringFocus]

As one commenter said, "it looks like a Christmas tree of SB-800s!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90mlK8ktV68&feature=related

[kidfiji]

At that point he might as well have bought studio-quality strobes.

[ShutteringFocus]

I assume he is getting some sort of high speed sync action since its the middle of the day out there in the desert.

Does anyone know?

Are each of those flashes being manually controlled for output etc.? It looks like he is firing them optically with the one mounted to his camera.

[Conner999]

He and Joe McNally were doing a shot in Dubai and using HSS because of the bright conditions, they needed a gaggle of strobes to get the light level up to a sufficient level. The shot and backstory are in McNally's book "The Hot Shoe Diaries". He admits a leaf shutter body and a battery-pack strobe would have been a better idea, but they just had a mess of SBs.

[TweakMDS]

Very interesting video. I seem to recall reading that you lose a flash stop for every shutter speed stop you increase (source: http://www.rpphoto.com/howto/view.asp?articleID=1026).

I wonder if it's worth the shutterspeed stops and if using an ND filter wouldn't be more ideal for this.
Of course the IQ could go down a bit when using a filter rather than HSS (or create flare when shooting straight into the sun), but it could be something to consider for those of us shooting with simple radiotriggers and manual flashes. With something like 4 flashes you can basically get to F/11 1/250th easily (possibly not even on full power if you use the right diffusers) - which already matches the sunny 16 in power. Of course being the Nikon guy he is, he's probably limited to ISO 200 - so that's another stop ;)
I do envy their flash system..

[spesmeadeus]

thats a lot of AA's

[Mark1]

There has been a few write-ups about this and why he had to have so many flashes.

Here are a few from Joe...
http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/2008/05/07/basic-dubai-shooting-kit-hi-speed-sync-a-hoodman-loupe/
http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/2008/05/19/david-of-the-desert/
http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/2008/05/27/holy-sand-dune/

One from David....
http://strobist.blogspot.com/2008/05/joe-mcnally-desert-shoot.html

[Jannie]

I always got the impression that they did that just to see if they could. They were there for a workshop and did this apparently as a personal exercise which of course added to his videos, Joe does a lot of his teaching around the use of speedlights but uses some strobes as well. I follow his blog and find it quite interesting.