I haven’t had a lot of time to work into digital night photography, but I did a quite a bit in the past with my trusty old - very old - all manual minolta and Kodachrome 64. As mentioned above, I mostly painted with light, mounting the camera on a tripod, locking open the shutter w/ a cable release and hand holding my flash and bouncing multiple flashes off of the subject. I’d try to keep the aperature fairly tight (perhaps f16) so that I’d have time to work to the left and right of my camera’s field of view to evenly light the subject. I’d bracket a series of exposures (maybe 5 second increments) and it was alway a great thrill to get them back from the lab to see what had been rendered. I have one such print at my desk at work and people seem to love it, because its not the usual old “walk up and snap a picture” kind of print. I found that kind of work very satisfying.
One upside of working at night is that during winter months, when the daylight is kinda of short and weak here in the great white north, there are more night time hours for night photos… and night photos on snow are a pretty cool thing.
You’ll get some interesting things that show up in night time prints, that weren’t apparent to the naked eye such as a signal going through all three of its phases, all captured on film, therefore looking like all three were lit at the same time… or the light streaks as seen in some of the examples above. Watch out for any bright spots in an otherwise fairly dark image (i.e. headlights or yard lights.) They’ll burn out a spot on the image. Smoke or steam at night with some back lighting creates a cool effect with a longer exposure. Kinda of ghostly.
Back to the original question - I’ve personally not had great luck using car lights. For me, they’ve been too low and to spot focused. &nbs