I took this tonight, close to midnight, as an experiment. I'm visiting friends in Vancouver, BC, Canada this weekend, and I wanted to do a bit of night photography, given how clear it is. I took a lot of different shots... water at night, lamplight on water, some variants on my rapidly-becoming-trademark lamppost and lantern shots. Some of them were quite nice, but I wanted to try something different than my usual. And since I'm somewhere different than my usual, it seemed like a good night to experiment.
I used my 'nifty fifty,' which is pretty much my customary lens for night shots. However, rather than the wide aperture (f/2.2, give or take two f-stops) that I usually use at night, I used f/6.3 for this shot. I shot it at ISO 100, and exposed for 30 seconds. The low ISO gave me a very smooth image, which is a lot of what I was aiming for.
In truth, the long exposure made the scene far, far brighter in the image than it was in reality! To my friend and I standing there, the lights were pretty enough, but the details of the buildings were mostly obscured to the naked eye, and the sky looked completely black. I expected to get more detail in the shot than we could see ourselves, but the city-light glow casting the sky in that color was an unexpected bonus. In all, I'm quite happy with the results!
(Though, admittedly, being in out of the cold and under the blankets of the guest bed, while I post this before keeling over, may bias my opinion slightly.)