Sony A7III Best Low Light Settings

hello photographers direct support for these videos comes from sales of my video courses or the use of my affiliate links all which can be found down in the description in this video i'm going to show you the best settings for taking low light photos using the sony a7 iii camera the very first thing you want to do is set the camera to manual mode that's the mode that i'm going to be in when i'm showing you the information here one of the things that you need to know about taking photos in low light is that there is no best set of settings because low light means a lot of different things so instead of telling you you should set your iso to this and your aperture that and your shutter speed to this i'm going to show you a process for choosing the best settings for the situation that you are shooting in that way no matter where you are you will end up with photos that you are happy with and the very first thing you need to do is determine what sort of shutter speed you need to get a sharp photo generally speaking you want sharp photos and generally speaking people are taking photos handheld and the camera shake problem is easily solved by using the focal length rule now it's called a rule but this is really more of a guideline and what it says is that you can safely hand hold your camera and get a sharp photo if your shutter speed is one over the focal length of your lens so what does that mean well let's take a look right here i have the sony 24 to 70 lens on this camera and currently the focal length is set to 24. now we're not going to use that we're actually going to zoom the lens out so that the focal length is sent to 70 millimeters with the focal length set at 70 millimeters i would want to use a shutter speed of 1 70th of a second if we try to set our shutter speed to 170th you'll notice that 170th doesn't exist so what you would do in this case is just choose something that's close enough you could go with 160th or with 180th either is fine but if you're in low light 160th is a little bit better because it's going to let in a little bit more light now if you're using a zoom lens the good rule of thumb is just to use the shutter speed that matches the longest focal length on the lens that way no matter what zoom length you use you know that you're using a safe shutter speed once you have your shutter speed set the next thing you want to do is set your aperture and when you're setting your aperture in a low light situation the best thing to do is set it to the lowest aperture setting which gives you the largest opening in the lens to let in as much light as possible and my aperture is actually already set to that and bear in mind the smallest number available on your lens will be different from my lens unless you're using the exact same lens that i'm using so f4 isn't necessarily going to be your smallest number and that's why i say just set it to the smallest number available to you after that you need to set your iso setting and what we're doing with the iso setting is setting it to bring our exposure indicator to zero you see that number on the bottom of the screen flashing at -2 right now that's telling me that the image is under exposed and because it's flashing it's actually telling me that it's underexposed by a lot it might be minus five or minus six or even minus ten so what we need to do is increase the iso until that number comes to zero so if you don't know how the iso is on the back of the camera it's this button right here which is on this control dial and if you press that button it brings up the iso menu and then you can spin this dial to change your iso so i'm going to point the camera at my microphone as if we were trying to take a picture of the microphone and then i'm going to increase my iso until we bring our exposure indicator zero now one of the things i don't like about changing iso is that it doesn't give you a preview of what the exposure actually is it shows you the preview of the image but it doesn't tell me what the exposure indicator's at so i have to kind of guess so i'm going to go to 2000 and take a look and i actually got lucky there my exposure indicator now is at zero so once you do that you can start taking your photos now there's another way you can do this that's a little bit easier if you don't want to mess around with having to set your iso because as you move around in a scene and take photos of different things you'll see the exposure indicator changes which means you may have to change your iso a lot and if you're in a situation where you're trying to take a lot of photos and you got to take them quickly changing your iso constantly might be a pain in the butt so what you can do is you can actually engage the auto iso function if you go back into the iso menu and you go all the way up you have an auto option and the auto will automatically set the iso to bring your exposure to zero and what that means is once you've set your aperture and shutter speed based on the guidelines i just gave you your iso will just automatically come in and bring your exposure to where it needs to be for a decent photo and that means you can just run around and take photos without worrying about it too much now you may have noticed that the auto iso quickly flashed at twelve thousand eight hundred and this is a complaint i get from people all the time when i talk about doing this in low light and that's oh my god i gotta use a high iso i'm gonna get noise you know what you need to chill out about the noise first of all the sony a7 iii is a fabulous full frame camera that has great low light high iso performance with minimal noise but even so when you increase the iso you're going to get noise but you know what that's what you have to do when you're shooting in low light that's just how it works if you're not willing to shoot at those high isos that means you're not willing to take photos the last thing i want to mention is image stabilization and when i talked about the shutter speed earlier i didn't mention it but the sony a7 iii has in-body image stabilization and that can actually help you shoot at slower shutter speeds while still avoiding blur from camera shake now how low you can go will vary from person to person because how steadily you hold the camera affects how well the image stabilization will work i would say that generally speaking most people should be able to shoot at at least one stop slower and still get a sharp image with the help of image stabilization so if we go back to the example i was shooting at 1 60th of a second but with image stabilization i could probably drop down to 1 30th of a second and because of image stabilization i wouldn't catch any blur in my images from camera shake now do be aware that image stabilization doesn't help with moving subjects so you still don't want to go below around 1 30th of a second for moving subjects in a scene and of course if they're moving faster say you're shooting sports in low light 130th isn't going to be any good because sports is fast moving action and you need much faster shutter speeds to capture that and on your a7 3 it is on by default if you go into your menu using the menu button on the back so it's camera menu two page four you can see i have steady shot highlighted and it's on and you might just want to double check that to make sure yours is turned on now i put all this together in a cheat sheet for you you can get that cheat sheet at this link right here if you have questions let me know down in the comments if you want to do that youtube to help me out that's great like subscribe whatever but make sure you take some damn photos

Channel: Spyros Heniadis

Views: 33,223

Keywords: sony a7iii low light settings, sony a7iii low light, best night settings for sony a7iii, best low light settings for sony a7iii, sony a7iii best low light settings, sony a7iii user manual, spyros heniadis, sony a7iii beginners guide

Id: CKq2ljVnntE

Length: 7min 12sec (432 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021