I was just cleaning up some work files, came across this photo and thought you guys might be interested in a couple of golf related insights from an old job of mine.
Thats a computer driven, robotic, "motion control" camera platform. Something used in a lot of tv commercials and movies these days for special effects photography where you need to be able to do identical repetitions to a camera move. Over and over and over and over and .....but thats another story. Anyways the camera on top of it is the Phantom camera similar to the one used in the filming of the Tiger Woods Nike spot that had that super nice slo mo of his swing against black.
During a break in the action I struck up a conversation with the camera technician who brought the Phantom to set. I wasnt even finished my question when he answered me with "Every pro golfer we shoot is always shocked at how much their shaft bends. They always ask if its real for some reason." To which I offered a few golf forum type explanations for a possible illusion...... artifact, video blur etc. His answer; "The shaft bends man, it really bends". He went on to tell me that if its visible in a single frame and/or clearly in focus its real and not illusion, for any camera. Besides the fact that he was talking about swing sequences shot with the Phantom that can do up to 4,000 frames per second.
The thing that bugged me about this was that in the Tiger Nike spot Tiger's shaft hardly bends at all. So on the next day of shooting I went back and asked my new friend about that one. To which he replied; "Tiger must have one heck of a stiff shaft". I wonder? As an aside, Homer liked them as stiff as you can get them, apparently. Sort of like I am with Martini's.
I also had an interesting discussion over lunch with the Motion Control programmer. I had noticed that despite the need for precise repetition in the camera moves, all the technology and all the civil war Monitor and Merimac like mechanics, that the camera would still shake around a fair bit. His reply: "Its becoming more of problem now that everyone has high definition televisions. The old crt t.v.s were more forgiving. We have to be very careful with our programing to avoid any sudden starts or stops. Its critical to keep the acceleration really smooth or else the wobble at the far end of the machine, what we call the "head" gets to be too much. Outside of acceptable limits. No amount of added weight or structure can fix it, if you've got it, all you can do is shorten the arm or slow down and try to keep the acceleration curves nice and smooth, no spikes."
We talked for some time about it all after which he actually asked me why the heck I was so interested in acceleration curves. I know you guys are familiar with "the rest of that story". He was an occasional golfer, I saw his eyes open up as I told him about it. He even wrote down the name of the book and took the address to this forum.
Ah, the laws that govern golf are not unique to golf. No sir!
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