Sony With Attitude

on September 18, 2019
Attitude indication is performed differently in many situations - teenagers do it by pouting and shouting, nations do it by taking political hostages, and airplanes have instruments on their dashboards to measure it. Here's a selection of different types in diagrammatic form - as seen on the internet. BTW I'm grateful to whoever took that superb picture of the Hurricane cockpit... In all three cases there is a little representation of an aircraft that dips from side to side in time with the reral plane. Then, if the real one is nose-down or nose-up, the brown and blue artificial horizon rises or falls accordingly. There may be a little difference between the way a Russian attitude indicator performs compared to a NATO one - the NATO horizon always stays flat while the Russian one tilts - but it is all in the pilot's training to follow their own pattern. You've likely got an attitude indicator in your DSLR or mirror-less camera that will let you set it to rights in a side-to-side manner, but do you have one that will tell you if the camera body is dipping or rising? I miss out on this with mine and I am sore about that. Sony users - like this A 6500: Are a lot luckier -they get the full report in the LCD screen: As annoying as some on-screen reports can be, this one is actually a time and picture saver. If you point up or down with your zoom lens set to a wide angle you are going to pay a hefty visual price with keystoning or steepling of the vertical portions of the image. You can iron this out in a computer editing program but sometimes you frame too tightly and run out of image. The attitude indicator here lets you get things dead flat and lined up before you press the shutter button - so there will be minimal visual distortion. A lot more sophisticated than the old carpenter's level balanced on top of the camera body... Now if they would only make the camera back in RAF Cockpit Green and give us a gun button. I promise not to misuse it.
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