Am I missing something? (D800, liveview, aperture)

Its seems when using liveview that the camera will stay stopped down the entire time. That is if you set it to F8, for example, it will stay F8 during composition, focusing and picture taking. Normally you would expect that a camera would open up to its widest aperture during composition and focusing, only to stop down during picture taking.

Is there some command to reverse this behavior? At higher F-stops the screen is practically black. Also a camera trying to do contrast detect auto focus past F8 is just silly.