Electronic viewfinders and night photography

On a recent trip to the island of La Palma (Canary Islands), I did some milky way photography. La Palma is known for its unpolluted skies (also no light pollution) and on the top of this volcanic island there are observatories from many European countries. I used my Canon EOS-1D X and my Sony A7R cameras and found that the electronic viewfinder of the Sony camera is a major disadvantage. I had not realized this so much, but the noise in the viewfinder at these low light levels far exceeds the starlight! There was no way to frame the milky way in any way using the viewfinder. I had to do this purely by trial and error. The only effective way is to use a special app or website like Photographers Ephemeris to determine where the milky way will be and frame your shot long before the night falls.

The optical viewfinder of the Canon doesn’t give that kind of problems. As long as you don’t use a lens with a very small aperture, you can still see the milky way well enough to frame different shots during the night. The image below is obviously a composite, but I like it anyway.

Milky way on La Palma island