Lincoln Memorial and Memorial Bridge The Memorial Bridge from the Virginia side of the Potomac. I love long nighttime exposures like this. Nearly every exposure choice you make (within reason) will give you something interesting on slide film. This clearly could have been a much longer exposure at the same aperture and still resulted in something usable, but I generally prefer a darker result. Another interesting experiment is to try tungsten-balanced film, rather than daylight-balanced film, for night cityscapes.
To meter something like this may seem difficult or intimidating, but it really isn't hard. The best bet is usually to find the most important element in the scene and spot meter it, then compensate from there. With a zoom like I used here, I probably zoomed in to a lit part of the Lincoln Memorial, spot metered, added a bit of light to the reading, then composed and shot at that exposure value. Bracketing is not a bad idea, and I took a couple of shots of this at the same aperture for anywhere from LENS: 100-400 at ~200mm | FILM: Fuji Velvia | EXPOSURE: f/16 at 10" | DATE: 05/00 |