Night exposure

If you were going to take a picture of something at night without flash, say an outdoor Christmas tree or a nativity scene, how would you judge what the exposure should be? And how would you judge the histogram to know if you got it right. At night there would certainly be a lot of dark pixels on the left of the graph and not much on the right side. So what should it look like?

Ken

Take a look here:
http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/717025

Google "night photography"...You will get more information than you can probably use.

Ken, I do a fair bit of night photography, and the while not useless, the histogram has to be taken with a grain of salt. The LCD display is your best friend and you should plan on bracketing a lot. I use spot metering and focus on highlights and bracket around that.

I guess that we should stop replying like "google your question and get the answer" here - everyone knows that - is not it?

Ken: bracketing is probably your best friend. I use high ISO setting to get a meter reading and then manually calculate the exposure time for the ISO that I will shoot (generally 200 or even lower). Depending on the subject, you will have to either use spot or matrix metering

Another note: if you are shooting at twilight, remember the change of light during a long exposure (like 5 min or more) and so dial in some extra minutes to compensate for that