today I'm gonna show you how to quickly compose your shots when taking
photographs at night so thanks to merde 1 for mentioning this and someone else
mentioned in in a comment as well so if this is you thank you this is one of
those features that is really well hidden I looked through the menus and I
couldn't find it anywhere I ended up finding it in the custom menus and this
is the only way that you'll get to it bright monitoring is a function where
the camera lowers the refresh rate on your monitor or EVF so it lets more
light in per frame this function works really well and after watching this
video and finding it and setting it to a custom button I suggest you go and try
it in the darkest room in your house you'll be really surprised at how much
light the camera will kick up this is how to set it up go to the second tab
and page 8 select custom key stills then you can assign it to whichever button
you want I have it set to the AEL button select the button you want and then find
bright monitoring on page 17 out of 22 on the a 73 now when you press it you
might find that it doesn't work basically it won't select bright
monitoring if you have the autofocus on so you'll have to switch it to manual
focus this shouldn't be too much of a problem because when you're shooting in
such dark conditions you'll need to be on manual focus anyway it'll then come
up with this nighttime landscape logo it works in both the monitor and the EVF
and it'll help you compose your image there are a couple of downsides to it
the first one being that it really lowers the refresh rate so when you move
the camera around it's really jittery and it takes time to update the screen
the other downside is when you press magnify to get critical focus it comes
out of bright monitoring back to the normal mode so to get critical focus
you're still going to have to find that bright star magnify in on it and then
focus in on that point if you want to learn more about focusing at night click
on the I in the corner this will take you to another of my videos with this
bright monitoring function I wanted to see what it was like in a real life
situation so the other week I went out and I went to a few different spots in
the portal to area you can only just about see the horizon you can't see any
details in the foreground although you can just about see the Milky Way in the
bottle five area everything in the shot is visible and the city just passed the
horizon is really bright so if you're shooting in a bottle too or a bottle one
area and there's no moonlight about it's still quite tricky composing your shot
if you're shooting in a bottle five two bottle three area bright monitoring will
work really well I'm not going to cover how to take a shot at night if you want
to learn how to do astrophotography shots click on the I in the corner this
will take you to my Astro photography video for astrophotography it was really
great to have this function what I'd normally do is set the ISO really high
and the shutter speed quite low and take a photo of a few seconds and then I'd
take a few shots until I got the composition that I wanted with bright
monitoring I didn't have to do this which is a great advantage and it speeds
up the process as I've already said the annoying thing was not being able to
magnify in and still have this brightness in the monitor I know my
lenses inside out so this doesn't bother me too much
I know exactly where the infinity point is and I know exactly where I need to
focus to and that's about it what I'm gonna do is make an updated Astro
photography tutorial including this bright monitoring function then you'll
be able to see my newer faster process if I've already made it it'll be on the
link on the I in the corner if not it'll be coming soon
so if you shoot with the a7 3 set bright monitoring to one of your custom buttons
go out and shoot at night and let me know in the comments below how you got
on it'll be great to hear your thoughts on this function as always if you like
what you see give me a thumbs up if you didn't give me a thumbs down and for
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