There are not a huge number of angles you can shoot downtown Minneapolis from, and I think I've photographed most of them at one time or another. This is something a little different - the edge of downtown proper, shot from the deck of the historic Stone Arch Bridge, which crosses the Mississippi right at Saint Anthony Falls.
On clear nights, there's a very narrow window of opportunity in which streetlights and floodlights are on, but there's still color in the sky. The conditions change rapidly, and getting a good image is as much luck as it is skill and experience. Where skill and experience help, though, is getting you in the right spot ahead of time.
This was shot late one summer evening, on 35mm Provia 100, in a variant of the Russian Zorki-4 rangefinder called a Mir, with a 50mm f/2 Jupiter-8 lens, focussed hyperfocally. The whole is more-or-less a copy of an early Leica, with the lens being an almost exact copy of the famous Sonnar. The combination is small, light, and capable of quite excellent results.
Night photographs like this one well demonstrate the idea of color temperature; there are streetlights in this picture with greenish, yellowish, orange, and nearly-white color balances. In person, they're all more-or-less white, but film is fooled far less easily than the eye.
Exposure was somewhere around twenty seconds at f/8; any more and the sky and bridge deck would be overexposured, and less and the sky would be blah and the skyscrapers would be featureless silhouettes.
There are four ways to determine exposure for nighttime shots like this. You can meter the foreground, and hope for the best; you can (try to) meter the sky, and compensate; you can use the surprisingly accurate rule-of-thumb of 10 seconds at f/5.6 with ISO 100 film; or, of you have a digital camera, you can chimp it until you get it right. I went with the rule of thumb, and experience - I shot almost two rolls of film over the course of five or six hours that day (and night), and didn't even have a meter with me. Experience at determining exposures is one of the most tangible benefits a photographer gains from working with all-manual equipment, and a source of frustration to those who rely on auto-everything cameras.