Swing, Driver

[BrianW]

Re: Swing, Driver

GoNavy: spot on.

Martin, that ball certainly shot off into the woods. You protest to much I think!

[Jeff Mann]

Re: Swing, Driver

Brian

Regarding the down-the-line video, one can see the direction of the ball flight in only one post-impact frame

See - http://jeffmann.net/MartinBall.jpg

The red "X" on the ground shows where the ball was teed up. One can see that the ball was pushed to the right. I suspect that it ended up more than 30 yards right of the centre of the fairway if it travelled >200 yards, but I could not see the ball in any other single frame.

One can also see the tee jumping sideways to the right in this picture.

Jeff.

[Martin Levac]

Re: Swing, Driver

GoNavy,

You wrote: "...there is no way either of the swing in the above video produced anything like you report, after all we have only the poor quality video and your word to prove this..."

These are the facts and you appear to accept all of them without reserve:

I am the person appearing in the videos.
Three other persons were present during the filming.
No person member of GTO was present during the filming, that includes you, GoNavy.

The following is what you don't want to accept at all:

Since I am the person appearing in the videos and since I am the person that swung that club and struck the ball, I must know what I did and where the ball went and how.

I'm sorry to inform you that you do not have this advantage, GoNavy.

You don't believe me when I tell you where I sent the ball or how I struck the ball in the videos. Fine, have it your way. But then you can't believe me either when I tell you that I am the person in the video.

You must take my word for it.

BrianW, I know where I sent the ball: I am the person appearing in the videos.

Jeff Mann, I know what I did.

ps. GoNavy, stop the personal attacks, please. Writing things like "You are delusional" is a personal attack. I don't know you and you don't know me, let's remain polite with each other.

[Martin Levac]

Re: Swing, Driver

Also please don't butcher Leslie Kings concept by saying the arms play an entire roll and the body just follows, that is not was King teaches, read again. The downswing starts with the feet.

http://www.golfpro-online.com/tuition/lking/three.html

I quote:
The Most Common Problem In Golf

All poor players, without exception, start the downswing by turning the shoulders first, while the feet remain static. This, of course, throws the club out of line from the top, and any possibility of a correct downswing is instantly ruined

In fact, in a correct downswing, the body should unwind from the feet…….up. This means that the feet and legs should come into play first with the shoulders unwinding last! In other words, the shoulder line must never run ahead of the hip line in the downswing.

end quote.

Here is the quote, from the same lessons, that explains exactly how the "arms play an entire role" and the body just follows:

http://www.golfpro-online.com/tuition/lking/one.html

"Therefore the first principle of the swing is .... THE GOLF ACTION IS BASED UPON A FREE SWING OF THE HANDS AND ARMS INDEPENDENT OF THE BODY. The body in fact has nothing to do with propelling (cause the movement of) the hands and arms at any time."

Please note the beginning of the sentence where it says "Therefore the first principle of the golf swing is..." Furthermore, it is repeated several times throughout the lessons to remind the student how important this principle is, how fundamental it is to the rest of the lessons.

Here is what I wrote:

"Unlike a great number of players, I apply force, I propel the club, with my arms, not with my lower body or core whatever that is. That means that the terms coil and unwind, the concepts of hip rotation and whatnot to produce power, don't apply to me. At least not in the sense of producing power. Leslie King's lessons teach this concept of swinging the hands while moving the body to support or allow this motion of the hands. A free swing of the hands and arms as it's called in those lessons."

Well now, it appears that I know exactly what Leslie King teaches.

To borrow your own words, GoNavy, please don't butcher Leslie King's concepts by misquoting them. Thank you.

[GoNavy]

Re: Swing, Driver

These are the facts and you appear to accept all of them without reserve:

What, where do I accept without reserve, I accept none of it.

I'm sorry to inform you that you do not have this advantage, GoNavy.

LOL...who trying to get an advantage, I don't care what you do in your golf swing, your not paying me. I could care less if swing the club upside down left handed. Once again you seem to have invented some kind of competition here that does not exsist. I simply stated I don't believe you or what you said you are doing.

You must take my word for it.

No I don't have too, don't have to do anything. You invited me to come comment on your thread, then, get upset when I do make a comment.

ps. GoNavy, stop the personal attacks, please. Writing things like "You are delusional" is a personal attack. I don't know you and you don't know me, let's remain polite with each other.

You are absolutely correct, that was a personal attack. I should not have done it. My appologies.

You can swing anyway you like, and say anything you like and at the end of day it really makes no difference. I don't believe you is all I am saying, and since you don't know me and I don't know you, that also makes no difference. I didn't say anything about your swing, only the results you reported to achieve with it. It was only my opinion bases on what I saw in the video, you don't like my opinion, thats fine.

[Martin Levac]

Re: Swing, Driver

GoNavy, it's like this.

If the person in the video was a total stranger that you and I had never met before, we'd know exactly the same thing, you and I. But the facts tell a different story. I am the person in the videos. Not only do I know exactly what you know by looking at the videos, I also know first hand what happened during the filming of the videos.

Perhaps you don't believe me because that would cause you to doubt your own senses. Look at it differently. Instead of doubting your senses, doubt the camera. I know for a fact that the camera lies. The camera doesn't see what I see. And I certainly must know what I see, otherwise I wouldn't be able to function properly.

Here's how the camera can lie and do it in such a fashion that it becomes believable to a point where theories are developed to account for the lies we see on the screen.

Focal plane shutter. In order to expose the film to light, we use a curtain that we draw across the focal plane, we call that a focal plane shutter. It's composed of two separate curtains, the opening curtain and the closing curtain. They move across the focal plane at a fixed speed. Because of this limitation, we must impart a delay in the opening and closing of the curtains to expose the film to light longer or shorter. For very short exposure times, what happens is that the curtains happen to move at the same time across the focal plane, thereby leaving only a slit open for light to strike the film. This open slit moves across the focal plane at a fixed speed. It moves either left to right or right to left, up to down or down to up. In certain designs, it can even move in an arc because the shutter is a spinning disk with a hole in it.

Now on to the object that is being captured on film. In this case, it's a moving object, a man swinging a club to strike a ball. As the object moves, so does the focal plane shutter. As the shutter moves, it exposes different parts of the film at different times. As the shutter does so, the object moves across the focal plane as well. So, the shutter exposes one part of the film to the object in this slice of time in that position. As the shutter and the object moves, every part of the film is exposed in sequence until the whole film is exposed to light.

The object, the club in this case, didn't stop moving just to have its picture taken. It kept on moving as it was being captured on film, slice of time per slice of time, until the whole area of the film has been exposed to light. Granted, the object didn't move much during that very short time but it did move. So, the clubhead would have been captured on film just before the grip. Since the grip was exposed after the clubhead, the clubhead has had time to move further and so forth until all parts of the club have been captured on film and all parts of the film had been exposed to light by that open slit between the curtains.

The same phenomenon happens in digital cameras, no matter what the makers of such cameras would have us believe. It's only one aspect of cameras that demonstrate how they can lie, there are other ways a camera can lie such as the perspective, light intensity, color, aspect ratio, depth of field, etc.

The result is the object appears to bend in unnatural ways:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XD-xVUwkMtY

Old pictures and films of racing cars show clearly what happens to the object (not to the object itself, but to the light coming off the object and striking the film) as it is captured on film. We can see this bending effect especially on the wheels.

Which brings me back to my videos and you not believing me. If the camera can lie and does so all the time, don't you think that my word has that much more weight?

[Jeff Mann]

Re: Swing, Driver

I don't think that it is rational to claim that cameras lie. A video camera records in continuous mode at approximately 1/1,000th second (with a sports setting). It may miss certain visual events. For example, the camera did not capture the club-ball impact in your swing video. However, it doesn't easily or deliberately misrepresent the visual reality that it does capture. Human beings, by contrast, sometimes deliberately decide to misrepresent reality and we label that "lying" when it happens.

Jeff.

[slater170]

Re: Swing, Driver

I don't think that it is rational to claim that cameras lie. A video camera records in continuous mode at approximately 1/1,000th second (with a sports setting). It may miss certain visual events. For example, the camera did not capture the club-ball impact in your swing video. However, it doesn't easily or deliberately misrepresent the visual reality that it does capture. Human beings, by contrast, sometimes deliberately decide to misrepresent reality and we label that "lying" when it happens.

Jeff.

nice one jeff
i smash my driver 350yds and as straight as a die but as soon as i film myself its a 200yd slice

[Martin Levac]

Re: Swing, Driver

nice one jeff
i smash my driver 350yds and as straight as a die but as soon as i film myself its a 200yd slice

I send the ball the same distance whether on film or not. Are you insinuating that I lie? And how would you go about verifying my claim?

[slater170]

Re: Swing, Driver

I send the ball the same distance whether on film or not. Are you insinuating that I lie? And how would you go about verifying my claim?

martin let it go!
im no expert but straight away i spotted that the drive was pushed!
thats not to say you always drive the ball that way

[Martin Levac]

Re: Swing, Driver

I don't think that it is rational to claim that cameras lie. A video camera records in continuous mode at approximately 1/1,000th second (with a sports setting). It may miss certain visual events. For example, the camera did not capture the club-ball impact in your swing video. However, it doesn't easily or deliberately misrepresent the visual reality that it does capture. Human beings, by contrast, sometimes deliberately decide to misrepresent reality and we label that "lying" when it happens.

Jeff.

The camera, through its own mechanism, lies all the time. Here, have another look to make sure your eyes aren't lying to you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XD-xVUwkMtY

If you were the man appearing in the video above, what would you trust, the camera or your own eyes? I'm certain the man appearing in the video above trusts his eyes over the camera indeed. He would surely say that the club did not bend the way we see in the video. I am inclined to believe him.

[Martin Levac]

Re: Swing, Driver

martin let it go!
im no expert but straight away i spotted that the drive was pushed!
thats not to say you always drive the ball that way

Of course, and that's exactly what I wrote in the details for the video in question. Check for yourself, it's to the right of the video, click <more>.

[BrianW]

Re: Swing, Driver

"Comments welcome. Disregard video quality for the moment." Well, if they are complementary.

Come on Martin, lighten up a bit! You are probably a nice guy and would be fun to play a round of golf with? (I take it you don't talk like in the video all the time, or was that an illusion due to the wheels of old cars )

OK, you know better than us where you sent the ball so we should not question it, you know better than us what Leslie King and Ben Hogan said, you understand the meaning of words, the meaning of life, cameras and bendy golf clubs better than us. Do you know the numbers in next weeks lottery please?

Just sit back and take a detached view of your modus operandi, if someone disagrees you enter into over long, over complex over detailed and patronising arguments. Keep it simple and to the point, you make some very good points and some powerful debates but at the expense of alienating yourself. We will all then enjoy and look forward to your contribution.

Nil Desperandum, illigitemae, carborundum .

[Jeff Mann]

Re: Swing, Driver

Martin - I took that video, and downloaded it to my computer. I then used the V1 Home swing analyser to move the video at a single frame rate.

I then captured these two images.

See - http://jeffmann.net/ClubBend.jpg

I have personally seen clubshafts bend in that manner if the clubhsaft is very flexible relative to the player's strength. The bend is also occurring in a naturally expected direction.

Why are you presuming that the camera is lying (misrepresenting reality)?

I certainly would not trust human perception because human beings are physiologically incapable of reliably detecting club bend during a golf swing.

Jeff.

[Martin Levac]

Re: Swing, Driver

Jeff Mann,

To end all arguments, you need to test. It's pretty easy, construct a disk on which you draw an X, two straight lines cutting across the center. Spin that disk as you film it. It will become obvious that the camera lies since the lines on the spinning disk can't physically bend although they will appear to bend on film. Once I own a camera, I'll do it myself.

In that "bendy golf club" video, you selected two believable frames. Perhaps you'd like to select other unbelievable frames to compare them against. Such as the ones where the player waggles the club prior to making the stroke or the ones below horizontal on the downswing. After you have selected these other frames, bear in mind that the camera doesn't just tell the truth during one part of the film and start lying in another part, it lies all the time. In other words, the mechanism that produces the illusion is equally active in all frames, not just in those that are unbelievable.

As I've written earlier, it is this illusion that has prompted many frivolous theories about the behavior of the club shaft as the player swings it. Or even ridiculous theories about the method that the player employs to swing the club. Something like "but he's slowing down just before impact, that's why the club bends forward." No, that's not it, that's an illusion caused by an inherent quality of the camera. In fact, as the player accelerates even faster, the illusion intensifies because the camera, compared to the player, maintains the same shutter speed. To eliminate the illusion altogether, the object being filmed must remain completely still. Even then, the camera lies in other ways.

I'm not speaking of the natural tendency for the club to bend under centripetal force that the player exerts on it as he swings it. Although we may be tempted to attribute this illusion to that tendency, the nature of centripetal force prevents it from producing such degree of bend as we see in that video. If I didn't know better and we found a golf club that bent in the same direction as the force that made it bend, I'd forget about what I know and accept the illusion as the truth. But I know better.

What about your personal experience? You did mention that you have personally seen a golf club shaft bend in the extreme as a player swung it. That is easy to demistify, take a pencil, waggle it between two fingers in front of your eyes. You will notice that it appears to bend. You know as well as I do that this phenomenon is due to retinal persistence. It is an illusion, the pencil does not bend in reality. Why not try to see if that particular mechanism will modify your perspective concerning a player swinging a golf club? First start with a very stiff shaft so that your starting data is uncompromised, then continue with a supple shaft. Simply substract the illusion bend that you perceive in the stiff shaft from the total bend you perceive in the supple shaft and you'll get a pretty good idea of how much the supple shaft does bend.

Or, move your hand very quickly in front of this very screen. The same principle applies to monitor screens because each pixel is drawn one at a time in sequence until the whole screen is drawn and the process repeats so many times per second. Try it left to right, right to left, up to down, down to up. You'd be amazed at how much fun this can be in the wee hours of the night when that's pretty much the only fun thing one can do.