How to film your golf swing with your phone (so it can actually be measured)

Almost every bad swing analysis starts with a bad video. Not blurry-bad — just filmed from the wrong place, with half the golfer out of frame, in light that turns the body into a silhouette. Here is how to avoid that, whether you’re going to look at the footage yourself, send it to a coach, or run it through an app.

Pick the angle for the question

There are two angles that matter, and they answer different questions.

Face-on — the camera looks at your chest, perpendicular to the target line, at roughly the height of your hands at address. Use it for:

tempo and swing timing
head movement side to side (sway)
hip slide toward or away from the target
shoulder tilt

Down-the-line — the camera sits behind you, on the target line, looking toward the target. Use it for:

setup: hip hinge, knee flex, how your arms hang
early extension (hips moving toward the ball in the downswing)
posture through the swing

If you only film one, film face-on for a driver session and down-the-line for a setup check. Don’t split the difference with a 45° angle: it gives you a bit of both and a measurement of neither.

Put the phone where it can see all of you

The single most common mistake is cropping. A measurement of your head, hips or feet needs those things in frame for the entire swing — including the finish, where your arms end up higher than you expect.

Stand the phone up in portrait, so the frame is tall.
Back it off until there’s clear space above your finish and below your feet. Roughly 3–4 metres (10–13 feet) is usual.
Get it off the ground. Hand height at address is the standard reference; a bag, a bench, or a small tripod all work. Filming from ankle height makes everything look like it’s leaning back.
Keep it still. A phone propped on a bag that shifts when you swing gives you a moving reference and useless measurements.

Light matters more than resolution

Body-tracking, whether it’s a coach’s eye or a computer vision model, needs to see the edges of your body. Two things ruin that:

Backlight. Sun behind you turns you into a shadow. Put the light source behind the camera or to the side.
Deep shade with bright background. Same problem from the other direction — the camera exposes for the bright bit and you go dark.

Overcast days are perfect. Indoor bays are usually fine if the lights are overhead and even.

Clothing helps too: something that contrasts with the background and isn’t so loose it hides where your hips actually are.

Frame rate: use slow-motion if you have it

A downswing lasts about a quarter of a second. At 30 frames per second that’s 7–8 frames — coarse enough that being one frame off changes a tempo ratio by more than 10%. Most modern phones will record at 120 or 240 fps in slow-motion mode, and that extra time resolution is the cheapest accuracy upgrade there is.

Slow-mo files are bigger and the phone gets warmer over a long session, so for a full bucket you might prefer 60 fps. For a handful of swings you want to look at closely, use slow-mo.

Filming a whole range session

If you’re filming more than a few swings, don’t touch the phone between them. Set it up once, hit the bucket, deal with the footage afterwards. Some apps will split a long recording into individual swings automatically; if yours doesn’t, a single long video is still easier to scrub than forty short ones you had to start and stop.

Check the first clip before hitting the rest. Ten seconds of scrubbing to confirm framing saves you from discovering that thirty swings were filmed with your head cut off.

A checklist

Before you hit:

Face-on or down-the-line — not in between
Portrait, phone at hand height, still
Whole body in frame at the finish, not just at address
Light behind the camera, not behind you
Slow-motion on if you want tempo
Watched the first clip back

Get these right and any analysis — human or software — has something to work with. Get them wrong and no amount of software will invent the parts of you it couldn’t see.