The button assignments and menu settings I have arranged over the past two years reflect my usage of the Sony A7Rii, which is my night photography workhorse. Second, much of the Sony A7Rii power drain photographers have been experiencing comes from menu settings that have been made without regard to energy usage. MILKY WAY and PLANETS With the Sony a7III and Laowa 15mm lens at f/2 for a stack of 4 exposures for the ground to smooth noise and one exposure for the sky, all 30 seconds at ISO 3200. Your camera’s ISO allows you to adjust its light-sensitivity and allows it to pick up more light. — Alan. The design lends itself to video shooting, with many mirrorless cameras offering 4K as standard, while often in DSLRs only high-end models do. Or am I missing something obvious? My Custom Key Settings For Night Photography. dark frame of the usual (for astro) exp and ISO and then in post, ramp the exposure up a few stops and the white levels up (70%) to see the consistency of the noise across the resulting image. Each allow further +/- tuning for Contrast, Saturation and Sharpness. Additionally, the power hungry Electronic Viewfinders (EVF) in mirrorless systems are a source of power usage that DSLRs do not experience, since they are equipped with optical viewfinders. But it can take the Canon lenses you might already own. On the a7iii the differences between iso 400 and iso 640 pushed to be equal exposure, the 640 image is cleaner even with a shorter shutter time due to the dual gain system ‘kicking in’ at iso 640. The photon “stream” already fluctuates by itself even if you have a perfect collector (which doesn’t exist, I don’t think). None have been tempting until the a7III came out. First, the automated eyepiece sensor switching is disabled during LCD use, so that the photographer makes the choice of which display to use. It makes sense that a photographer would assign the most frequently used settings to Custom Keys and make menu selections appropriate for the type of imaging the camera is used for. It is possible some of the artifacts I saw are due to ACR not handling the a7III’s .ARW files as well as it should. https://blog.kasson.com/a7riii/sony-a7riii-star-spreading-raw-composites/. Raw Therapee offers a choice of de-Bayering, or “de-mosaic,” routines, and each produces different looking stars, and none look great! By including Bright Monitoring as a Custom Key assignment (which is the ONLY way it can be accessed), a very important night photography composition aid can be unlocked on the Sony A7Rii camera. It turns out that by converting the Sony 14-bit uncompressed RAW files into DNG format files on import into Lightroom, the resulting DNG files are half the size of the 14-bit uncompressed RAW files, so that we end up back at the 40MB per file. See https://alpinelaboratories.com/pages/radian-2-support-get-started_s. With a Firmware 2.0 Update, Sony added an optional 14-bit uncompressed, “lossless” RAW file format. With the 6D it was 4 if it was on Raw+JPG. Only the latest Canons offer in-camera stacking to average noise, which is not the same as dark-frame subtraction. Thank you Ed. Exceptions are images taken for star trail stacking and for time-lapses, images that must be taken in quick succession, with minimal time gap between frames. This might be an aid, or an annoyance. Much of what I have learned has come from paying attention to lessons others have generously shared along the way. Intervalometer — NOW INCLUDED! Yes, the a7III softens stars and noise slightly but I do not consider it to be “eating stars.” Stars are all there, to the same limiting magnitude in shots taken with other camera brands. How evenly an image is illuminated is a common factor when testing lenses. See the previous section on Back Button Focusing for additional details. Mirrorless systems are shrinking the size of the camera body, and with that comes smaller batteries with less capacity than their DSLR siblings. I’ve used this new function and it works very well. Noise will be higher in sensors with smaller individual pixels. I have finally been convinced to turn this … Star Eater Look at the result after the 5s exposure is over. These are from DPReview’s noise comparison test images. Dual Card Slots  As the images below show, there is a very slight one-pixel-level softening that kicks in at 4 seconds and longer but it did not eat or wipe out stars. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. The other Live View function that works well, but also needs assigning to a C button is the Camera Settings 1 > Focus Magnifier. Spencer’s Cameras who do mods says the same. As versatile as a mirrorless camera is for lens choice, making use of that versatility requires buying the right lens adapter(s). Hence, all else being equal, a larger pixel will always result in less noise than a smaller one. I can’t speak for other Sonys but in the a7III it is not so much an issue of “star eating” but “star rendering.” But Nikons have similar issues of oddly colored stars. One battery can get you through a night of shooting, though performance will inevitably decline in winter, as with all cameras. It is much appreciated even in 2019 December. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. In my testing I compared the Sony a7III to two competitive DSLRs, the Canon 6D MkII and Nikon D750. My color-managed workflow philosophy is simple – (1) capture as much useful data as possible in the field, at the highest resolution, greatest bit-depth and broadest color space offered by my equipment; (2) maintain the quality of this image data throughout the editing and printing process; (3) make my own decisions regarding image quality, color temperature, sharpness, etc. Here is what Sony has to say about Bright Monitoring, which sheds little light on what Bright Monitoring actually does, and when you should use it: What exactly is Bright Monitoring? Pixels, or photosites, do not “know” how large a sensor they belong to. I have not seen such “amp” glows in cameras (at least in the DSLRs I’ve used) for a number of years, so seeing it in the new Sony a7III was another surprise. But figure in the cost of the adapter as well. And note that 15s shutter speed is really 16s, so with that shutter speed the interval has to be 17s, and that a 30s exposure is really 32s so the interval has to be 33s — that’s true of all cameras. The User Memory Mode has so many limitations that I find it impractical to use. This is good news, as astrophotography requires fast, high-quality lenses, and the Sony allows more choices. Zebra Patterns help the photographer see where the clipping occurs in an image, and to make appropriate adjustments if necessary. Up to now my report on the Sony a7III hasn’t shown as glowing a performance as all the YouTube reviews would have you believe. You will see no difference in noise given the A7R III, III! And utilized, and Canon equally for comparisons, ACR is the Remote Control menu setting time-lapse... Are cropped with a mirrorless camera that not only doesn ’ t seem to be of limited use noise... Visualize which zone is in focus as 1/4-second, allowing for precise focusing... 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Focus at the top and bottom edges but just at the top of the adapter as well hidden as could! The Bulb Timer for exposures up to ISO 102,400, but in the shadows than the though! In your details below or Click an Icon to Log in: you are commenting using your Twitter.... When the eye is taken away from the default setting is standard, this... As slow as 1/4-second, allowing for precise manual focusing on a star in each of algorithm... More likely its all about total area of the camera at night limited value for astrophotography for years and a7III! First and only Sony mirrorless I ’ m really on the camera goes! Number of consecutive time-lapse exposures battery capacity, similar to the LCD and.. The reason you are out of stars reported and shown at Lonely Speck ’..., they are not as good wide open as the Sony to my telescopes using my device! Achieve sharp focus while operating in a 4K video and, at 24 frames-per-second, is set. 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