Super Flop Shots with the Phantom High-Speed Camera

[iacas]

Here, for enjoyment, discussion, etc. is two of the many high-speed (12,000 FPS) videos we shot when the Phantom camera was up in Erie, PA. This shows the types of shots discussed (off-topic) in another thread.

You'll notice that the ball hovers for a split second before the clubhead actually hits the ball with positive AoA.

A few little things:

• The ball traveled about a yard or two, max. Some of them landed almost exactly on the spot from which it was hit.
• Those are the  Sensei shoes in the background. On my feet.
• The shaft is not leaning as far back as it appears - I'm swinging well left, and the clubface is open.
• That's an  60° (digger grind) wedge hitting both of the shots.
• I have a pretty cool overhead view where you can see these same types of shots, and on one, the ball just moves straight up toward the camera, barely spins, and falls down in the same spot. It went about six inches in the air, and rotated about 1/2 turn. I'm keeping that one for myself.
• Notice how long the clubhead is low enough to the ground to get under a ball. The mat is pretty firm. This isn't the gel-filled portion.

Enjoy! Discuss!

Let me know what questions you have, or thoughts, or ideas… etc.

[mvmac]

Very cool video, nice demonstration 

41 minutes ago, iacas said:

Notice how long the clubhead is low enough to the ground to get under a ball. The mat is pretty firm. This isn't the gel-filled portion.

Yes that was good to see. You know the AoA has to be shallow but it was was interesting to see how far behind the ball the club comes into contact with the matt and then "glides" along the ground. 

[boogielicious]

Cool, thanks!

[nevets88]

Thanks. If you hit the same shot from the fairway, not tight, not fluffy, does that change the behavior of the ball, clubhead or ground?

[saevel25]

Awesome video. I notice the club is actually going upwards into the ball a bit at impact. 

[Mr. Desmond]

3 minutes ago, saevel25 said:

Awesome video. I notice the club is actually going upwards into the ball a bit at impact. 

Noticed that too. 

Appreciate the vid. Great lie  (technique) for the club to remain underneath the ball for so long.

Edited November 11, 2015 by Mr. Desmond

[iacas]

1 hour ago, saevel25 said:

Awesome video. I notice the club is actually going upwards into the ball a bit at impact. 

That's why I said…

9 hours ago, iacas said:

You'll notice that the ball hovers for a split second before the clubhead actually hits the ball with positive AoA.

 The mat actually gets pushed away from the ball by the clubhead and the ball hovers in mid-air before the club, with a positive AoA, pushes it upward.

BTW, @natureboy, the AoA is… let's say… +5°. The ball takes off nowhere near even 45°. The face is still the dominant factor in the initial launch direction of the ball.

1 hour ago, nevets88 said:

Thanks. If you hit the same shot from the fairway, not tight, not fluffy, does that change the behavior of the ball, clubhead or ground?

I could not hit as far behind it, particularly if the ground is firm. But let's be clear, again: these aren't shots you play. The shot goes nowhere. You can't even catch it because sometimes the shot goes up a few inches. Sometimes you can swing right under the ball even on a fairly firm mat.

Clubhead speed was around 65 MPH on some of these. You have to generate a good amount of speed because the blow is so glancing… virtually no energy is put into the ball.

[nevets88]

25 minutes ago, iacas said:

That's why I said…

 The mat actually gets pushed away from the ball by the clubhead and the ball hovers in mid-air before the club, with a positive AoA, pushes it upward.

BTW, @natureboy, the AoA is… let's say… +5°. The ball takes off nowhere near even 45°. The face is still the dominant factor in the initial launch direction of the ball.

I could not hit as far behind it, particularly if the ground is firm. But let's be clear, again: these aren't shots you play. The shot goes nowhere. You can't even catch it because sometimes the shot goes up a few inches. Sometimes you can swing right under the ball even on a fairly firm mat.

Clubhead speed was around 65 MPH on some of these. You have to generate a good amount of speed because the blow is so glancing… virtually no energy is put into the ball.

It's like a foul tip in baseball that just nicks the ball so that the trajectory after contact barely changes and the catcher has a good chance of catching the ball.

[natureboy]

4 hours ago, iacas said:

BTW, @natureboy, the AoA is… let's say… +5°. The ball takes off nowhere near even 45°. The face is still the dominant factor in the initial launch direction of the ball.

Cool video. I see the AoA on this shot is upward. Where was the ball position relative to your feet / sternum. Where was your weight - lead or trail side? Are you saying the vertical launch is higher than 45*? Looks like that to me.

As far as the initial launch direction, I see a nearly vertical face with ball flight primarily upward. Regarding the OT points made in the other thread, that's what I was saying. You may have been talking about the vertical launch, but I was talking about the direction the ball travels relative to the target line / horizontal launch component / direction of flight along the ground between ball and target. So with the primary influence of face angle sending the ball upwards, the direction along the ground might have more effective influence / contribution from the path vector (the face is oriented such that it should minimally influence the direction along the ground - it's not driving the ball forward much at all which is evident in your descriptions of the ball flight). What this 2-D video is showing is the vertical launch component which is not a surprise to me. Where the balls that travelled a few yards landed relative to your aim line / target (if you had one in this experiment) would be more relevant to what I was saying.

As far as my experience with extreme lobs hit similarly (but less extreme open face and shallow AoA - so more friction at impact). It is possible that with ball a bit forward in stance and slight upward AoA / impact late in the swing arc, I was effectively pulling the ball off the target line a bit. I had much more height than you describe and definitely saw a fair bit of backspin (looked to be roughly horizontal spin axis) so the impact was much less glancing than in the video, but these were 'mortar shots' that went significantly higher than they did forward in the range of 6'-10' along the ground with about 2-3 feet left (could be less or more - hit them a long time ago) of what I saw as where the face was pointing along the ground to target and closer to my stance line than my target line.

Edited November 11, 2015 by natureboy

[iacas]

2 hours ago, natureboy said:

Cool video. I see the AoA on this shot is upward. Where was the ball position relative to your feet / sternum. Where was your weight - lead or trail side? Are you saying the vertical launch is higher than 45*? Looks like that to me.

• AoA was probably +2 to +5°.
• One ball forward of center, tops.
• Weight was predominantly forward. Like a bunker shot. 65% or so.
• And yeah, of course the launch is higher…

2 hours ago, natureboy said:

As far as the initial launch direction, I see a nearly vertical face with ball flight primarily upward. Regarding the OT points made in the other thread, that's what I was saying. You may have been talking about the vertical launch, but I was talking about the direction the ball travels relative to the target line / horizontal launch component / direction of flight along the ground between ball and target.

You don't seem to understand that they're very nearly the same physics. The ball is round and it sees a flat object hitting it. If the loft is 84° and the path is 5°, the ball launches at 72°. Closer to the face angle.

The same physics (very nearly) apply regardless of the plane. Swing left with a right-pointing face and the ball will still start closer to the face than the path.

2 hours ago, natureboy said:

So with the primary influence of face angle sending the ball upwards, the direction along the ground might have more effective influence / contribution from the path vector

It does not. I said it over there, and I'll say it again here. It's not > 50% of the initial starting direction.

2 hours ago, natureboy said:

What this 2-D video is showing is the vertical launch component which is not a surprise to me. Where the balls that travelled a few yards landed relative to your aim line / target (if you had one in this experiment) would be more relevant to what I was saying.

To be clear, I didn't make this video to show you anything. The other thread simply reminded me I had some cool video and so I dug it out of the archives and uploaded two of them to YouTube.

These videos do prove that I can say and prove that I've hit these shots, which you had encouraged me to do in the other thread, and can speak to the results.

The ball is not influenced by the path even 60%. It still pretty much goes where the face is pointing. When the blow is this glancing, it's much closer to the path. In this video it's about 91% based on the vertical launch and it wouldn't surprise me if it was the same horizontally, either. Only when you get to around 45° does approach the closest it'll ever get to a path influence (and even then it caps out at around 40%).

Again, not including clumps of grass or sand.

2 hours ago, natureboy said:

Where the balls that travelled a few yards landed relative to your aim line / target (if you had one in this experiment) would be more relevant to what I was saying.

Closer to where the face was pointing. Watch the shadow here. Don't be fooled by parallax.

 

2 hours ago, natureboy said:

As far as my experience with extreme lobs hit similarly (but less extreme open face and shallow AoA - so more friction at impact).

You have not hit lob shots like this (unless you were similarly goofing around). These are completely impractical shots for 99.9999999% of the situations golfers face around the greens.

2 hours ago, natureboy said:

It is possible that with ball a bit forward in stance and slight upward AoA / impact late in the swing arc, I was effectively pulling the ball off the target line a bit.

Or you had grass in play, which I've accounted for in nearly every post I've made to you on this. Or you didn't deliver nearly as much loft as you thought, and because you were swinging left with a laid open face, the face was pointing left when you took some of the loft back off. These are hit with about 85° loft. You might have set up with 80° but returned 70° at impact, closing the face a little along the way.

2 hours ago, natureboy said:

It is possible that with ball a bit forward in stance and slight upward AoA / impact late in the swing arc, I was effectively pulling the ball off the target line a bit. I had much more height than you describe and definitely saw a fair bit of backspin (looked to be roughly horizontal spin axis) so the impact was much less glancing than in the video, but these were 'mortar shots' that went significantly higher than they did forward in the range of 6'-10' along the ground with about 2-3 feet left (could be less or more - hit them a long time ago) of what I saw as where the face was pointing along the ground to target and closer to my stance line than my target line.

What do you think the path was like in the shots I hit? Because it was above 30° left. I want to estimate 45° left, but I'd wager my life it was above 30° and wager yours that it was above 35° left.

I'd imagine your path was well left - left of about 2 feet. You also probably didn't hit the ball only 6' forward. A shot that goes "significantly higher" than 6' while only advancing 6' is not a shot people need to play very often at all. I will hit the shot that goes higher than it goes farther from time to time, but it's exceedingly rare.

There are now at this point three sides to this. There's your memory, it seems to me, and that stands in opposition to my experience, the video(s), and the science/data I have seen.

Now, this thread is still not about all that. You had said something like "you should try it sometime" and I remembered I had, and posted two of the videos because they're cool. That's it.

[natureboy]

2 hours ago, iacas said:

You don't seem to understand that they're very nearly the same physics. The ball is round and it sees a flat object hitting it. If the loft is 84° and the path is 5°, the ball launches at 72°. Closer to the face angle.

You don't seem to understand the clearly worded sentences I am writing.

Obviously (to me) the flat face angle influence is going to launch it higher. I have never been talking about the vertical launch angle or the vertical angle of the resultant. I fully agree with the modern ball flight laws. I have been talking all along about the component along the ground - left or right of target.

With the face angle oriented so it contributes very little to the left or right of the shot - mostly into vertical launch then the path may have a greater effective influence on the left-right dispersion of the shot relative to the target. Not greater influence on the angle of the resultant from the horizontal (side-on view as in video), but on the angle of the resultant relative to the target (top-down view). Please respond to that and not your straw-man argument. http://thesandtrap.com/forums/topic/78946-logical-fallacies-poster/#comment-1054149

 

Quote

When the blow is this glancing, it's much closer to the path. In this video it's about 91% based on the vertical launch and it wouldn't surprise me if it was the same horizontally, either.

Sorry, wording here is not clear to me. What is 91% in the video based on vertical launch and possibly the same horizontally?

 

Quote

You have not hit lob shots like this (unless you were similarly goofing around). These are completely impractical shots for 99.9999999% of the situations golfers face around the greens.

I have many times as a practice exercise on the range. Never during a round. Like I said less than near-vertical launch. Carry from a full swing probably varied in the range of 6-15' depending on contact (except for the odd bladed ball) with a full swing. Height was always greater than carry unless one was sitting up and it was a near-whiff with the club going almost completely under.

 

Quote

I'd imagine your path was well left - left of about 2 feet. You also probably didn't hit the ball only 6' forward. A shot that goes "significantly higher" than 6' while only advancing 6' is not a shot people need to play very often at all. I will hit the shot that goes higher than it goes farther from time to time, but it's exceedingly rare.

My path was indeed well left. Like I said the ball was landing between my target line and my stance line which was very open, but closer to the stance line. This surprised me, because I knew at that point that face angle was king and expected this to apply to lateral dispersion as well as the vertical launch angle. Don't tell me you know my own life better than me or snidely imply I'm making up a memory. Stop trying to 'win' the argument and read what I've actually written. I am agreeing with you 100% about the D-plane resultant, but that has never been the point I was making.

The video example is great instructional info / exploration from an instructor. It is also completely as I expected. Nothing in the video or your experience contradicts the point I was actually making with the words I actually wrote. Perhaps only in what you misinterpreted I was saying or maybe what you wanted to believe I was saying.

 

So the question (for me) remains. On a shot like in the OP video with a face angle similar to, but not quite as open to the sky / horizontal to the ground through impact, what degree of influence on the lateral dispersion of the ball relative to the target line does the face angle (relative to the target line) vs. path angle (relative to the target line) have? The video from behind seems to be showing a similar result as I was describing - ball deviates from target line and lands between stance / path  and target line...only with almost no carry, which I doubt I could do off a mat.

Edited November 12, 2015 by natureboy

[iacas]

20 minutes ago, natureboy said:

You don't seem to understand the clearly worded sentences I am writing.

I do. This is, however, the last time I'm going to expend any energy trying to convince you of that.

You are still missing the point that the physics doesn't change just because the "plane" does. To put it in 2D terms, I never really understood why the people who thought the ball started along the path could reconcile the fact that hitting down on the ball didn't also make the ball start DOWNWARD into the ground*. In truth, whether you're talking about horizontal or vertical launch, the ball starts more toward the face angle (loft in the vertical direction, left/right in the horizontal) than the path.

Spoiler

* Though for those who thought the ball was actually pinched against the ground, maybe they did think the ball started downward and, what, bounced off the ground? I don't know.

Same stuff here. Physics doesn't care whether we're talking about vertically or horizontally. The physics are basically the same. It seems to me you haven't "gotten" that yet.

20 minutes ago, natureboy said:

Obviously (to me) the flat face angle influence is going to launch it higher. I have never been talking about the vertical launch angle or the vertical angle of the resultant. I fully agree with the modern ball flight laws. I have been talking all along about the component along the ground - left or right of target.

You don't get to say stuff like "I fully agree" (never mind whether you can "agree" with a fact or not…) and then question the horizontal component. Hell, that's the bigger part of the ball flight laws, the part the "ball starts on the path" guys were concerned about. Very few of them probably thought the ball started DOWNWARD with the path from a vertical consideration, but they all thought it started along the path. In that sense, you're disagreeing with the ball flight laws.

We know for a fact that the ball starts closer to the face angle. In this case, that's still true. It's true whether you're talking about the vertical axis or the horizontal.

20 minutes ago, natureboy said:

With the face angle oriented so it contributes very little to the left or right of the shot

I think this is part of where you set off down the wrong set of tracks or something… Two things:

1. The path contributes very little as well.
2. The face angle still contributes something.

Thought experiment for you: if you swing and whiff, how much is the face going to contribute to the starting direction of the ball (in any axis or plane)? How about the path?

The answer to both is zero, obviously. The ball won't move (not because of the clubface or path, anyway). Maybe it just falls down if the club took out some grass beneath the ball or something.

So in this case, the clubface has very little influence on anything, but the same is true of the path. There's just not a lot of contribution from EITHER of the things. Very little energy is applied to the ball. It's almost a whiff. The ball doesn't get a lot of energy from anything in this case.

20 minutes ago, natureboy said:

With the face angle oriented so it contributes very little to the left or right of the shot - mostly into vertical launch then the path may have a greater effective influence on the left-right dispersion of the shot relative to the target.

The path contributes "very little to the left or right of the shot" as well. The face isn't adding "mostly into vertical launch." It's playing the same role it always plays in that sense. You're not getting one of the simple facts I shared: the plane of action does not matter all that much.

Let's imagine we had 80° loft and +5° AoA. I'll rotate the entire system around so that it's horizontal. So, let's imagine the face is pointing 80° right of the target line and the path is +5°: we'd probably see the ball launch at about 70° to the right - significantly closer to the face angle than the path. Or let's imagine the face is square to the target and the path is 75° left of the target. The ball would launch about 10° left of the target line. And finally, if the face was 80° closed and the path was -5° (left), we'd see the ball launch about 70° left of the target line.

In each case, the clubface would contribute significantly more to the starting direction of the ball than the path… just as we see in the vertical direction. Physics doesn't care about that stuff. At such an obtuse angle the orientation of the grooves don't even matter all that much - the ball doesn't sink or deform into them at all and the corners are barely catching anything.

20 minutes ago, natureboy said:

Not greater influence on the angle of the resultant from the horizontal (side-on view as in video), but on the angle of the resultant relative to the target (top-down view). Please respond to that and not your straw-man argument. http://thesandtrap.com/forums/topic/78946-logical-fallacies-poster/#comment-1054149

You're still not understanding.

That's not a straw man, but I can see how you'd think it was… because you don't seem to understand that the vertical/horizontal/backward/forward/inside-out/whatever doesn't matter.

The physics is pretty much the same regardless of the orientation. Vertical, horizontal, inward, upward, outward, backward… it doesn't matter. Until gravity starts to take over it's just a flat thing glancing a round thing of certain types of coefficients of friction, speed, etc. The clubface is not SUPER sticky in the horizontal direction but the opposite in the vertical direction. It's still steel on urethane. The physics are almost exactly the same.

Here's a little diagram. This diagram would be fairly accurate (I didn't spend a lot of time measuring these things, so I'm not vouching that they are "accurate to within 0.1°" or anything like that) whether you're looking from the top down or the side on. The physics are basically the same.

20 minutes ago, natureboy said:

Sorry, wording here is not clear to me. What is 91% in the video based on vertical launch and possibly the same horizontally?

80° loft, 5° AoA, 75° spin loft. Ball launches at 72°, which is 8° away from the face angle and 67° away from the AoA. 67°/75° = 89%. I used slightly different numbers above to get 91%. The ball launched 91% of the way toward the face angle (or 9% of the way toward the path). Or 89% and 11%.

That's going to be roughly the same in any plane or direction (vertical, horizontal, up, down, left, right, sideways, whatever). Less so as you approach the 45° spin loft number because the corners of the grooves begin to interact more.

20 minutes ago, natureboy said:

My path was indeed well left. Like I said the ball was landing between my target line and my stance line which was very open, but closer to the stance line.

 

Color me more than skeptical… unless of course you're leaving out the grass and/or sand that I've mentioned several times, which changes this discussion quite a bit (so much as to be almost pointless as nobody will ever really have an idea what grass, how much grass, what kind of lie, etc.).

20 minutes ago, natureboy said:

So the question (for me) remains. On a shot like in the OP video with a face angle similar to, but not quite as open to the sky / horizontal to the ground through impact, what degree of influence on the lateral dispersion of the ball relative to the target line does the face angle (relative to the target line) vs. path angle (relative to the target line) have? The video from behind seems to be showing a similar result as I was describing - ball deviates from target line and lands between stance / path  and target line...only with almost no carry, which I doubt I could do off a mat.

The question has been answered multiple times. And even in the video from "behind" the ball lands much closer to the face angle than the path.

In the shot I hit today - just as every similar shot I hit with the Phantom camera, and every shot I've hit measuring with FlightScope, Trackman, or even camera-based systems which can see the clubface - the ball launches and lands much closer to the face angle than the path. It's "just left of" the face angle and "well right of" the path.

There's parallax and various planes of motion and whatnot here, so you can't measure any "angles" accurately, but it's clear from these the ball did not travel very far left (while the path was pretty far left):

Again, on one side of things, we have your memories of what happened to you, without any description of the lie, or any grass/sand/debris. Maybe you had a perfectly clean lie, I don't know.

On the other side of things we have these videos, my experiences, and way more importantly: what we know about the physics of launching a golf ball.

I'm siding with the second and consider this a fact.

---

And though I suspect I know how you'll take this, I have to state it again: I started this thread because in digging up the videos we shot with the Phantom, I thought these two shots were particularly cool. I did not start this thread to do you the favor of starting the thread I told you to start in the other thread after you'd ventured off topic. This thread will now return to its original purpose, and you remain free to start the thread covering the topic you want to discuss.

[mvmac]

6 hours ago, iacas said:

Closer to where the face was pointing. Watch the shadow here. Don't be fooled by parallax.

 

Thanks for also posting this. Good illustration of using speed to hit this shot a few feet.

[natureboy]

4 minutes ago, mvmac said:

Thanks for also posting this. Good illustration of using speed to hit this shot a few feet.

How many degrees of toe-up do you guys usually have on this shot through impact or do you get the clubface essentially horizontal? It looks really close to dead level in the OP super slow mo vid and very tough to pull off.

Edited November 12, 2015 by natureboy

[iacas]

7 minutes ago, natureboy said:

How many degrees of toe-up do you guys usually have on this shot through impact or do you get the clubface essentially horizontal? It looks really close to dead level in the OP super slow mo vid and very tough to pull off.

Don't know. Don't care.

This isn't a shot you play on the golf course.

Again, it's just a fun little video. It's fun to see the ball hovering for a second. It's fun to see the ball hit with a nearly vertical face with a positive AoA. It's fun to see video at 12,000 FPS.

[mvmac]

25 minutes ago, iacas said:

This isn't a shot you play on the golf course.

Again, it's just a fun little video. It's fun to see the ball hovering for a second. It's fun to see the ball hit with a nearly vertical face with a positive AoA. It's fun to see video at 12,000 FPS.

Right, it's just a cool thing to share. Not something you'd ever put in play. Like a trick shot or something.