It's impossible to get it to be exact (though, Dragonframe claims their 60 dollar live view reset tool thingy does the trick, but I don't know of anyone who actually owns it), but you can get pretty close.

Turn your camera from Manual to Tv move (Shutter Priority) and shoot in that. This tells the camera that you want to manually adjust the shutter but it can manually determine the aperture. In the case of a manual lens, there is no way to control the aperture, so it assumes it's wide open and guesstimates the correct brightness of the shot. It sometimes gets pretty close, but most of the time it's pretty much way off. But it is definitely helpful for the live view so you can at least see out of it in dark scenes.

YouTube • Website

"Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." - 1 Corinthians 10:31b

Thanks for the tips guys! I'll have to give it a try when I have time. I have a feeling that Exposure Preview Offset thing may do the trick.

I used the exposure preview offset option, and set it to max (+4). That seemed to work pretty well. It was still not as lit as the final image, but it was much more bearable. After tinkering around with the lens, I made this video yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqshKO4SlrU (It was also a good excuse to try out some Nikon extension tubes that I had laying around ) Thanks for your help guys!