On paper this scene should not work. A floodlit white stone bridge sits against a sky with no light in it at all, the water throws back a dozen point sources at different colour temperatures, and the whole thing has to be held still by hand because you are standing on a floating pontoon with people moving past your shoulder. Start with why the tripod is not the answer here. The banks along this stretch are narrow, busy well past midnight, and the good vantage points are all working infrastructure: vaporetto stops, taxi pontoons, delivery moorings.

The Nikon Z8 at ISO 12800 produces files that are usable for print. This is the relevant benchmark. Not that the files are clean — they are not, in the way that base ISO files are clean. They are usable, which means the noise structure is fine-grained rather than blotchy, the color noise is manageable, and the luminance noise in shadow regions responds well to noise reduction without smearing detail. On a night street, ISO 12800 is the thing that makes photographs possible that were previously impossible without flash.