Originally Posted by
DanK
Ike,
My suggestion is to keep the ISO as low as possible in night photography, using longer exposures to compensate. As long as you don't expose to the left, you can get very smooth, low-noise images that way. Assuming that nothing is moving that would make a long exposure problematic, the one limitation is that particularly in a hot environment (Tel Aviv in the summer!), a very long exposure can cause the sensor to overheat, which will ruin the image. However, depending on the camera, you can go quite long without having that problem. In this image, you only need three stops to get down to ISO 100, which is the base on my cameras, and you were only at 1/5 second. I routinely go to 20 seconds or more for urban night photography and 5-10 minutes for shots out in the wilds.
In this image, you have taken up the full dynamic range of the camera, so ETTR is not an issue. However, in night photography that doesn't take up the whole dynamic range, you will sometimes get noticeably less noise if you expose all the way to the right and then darken the image to taste in postprocessing, rather than shooting it dark to begin with.
Dan