Good answers above, but a few guidelines:
- A shot like this doesn't really require freezing subject motion or perhaps more accurately the motion of people, cars, and trees swaying in the wind won't be very noticeable in the overall image shot from this distance so you can get away with longer shutter speeds as long as you're shooting from a tripod. If you had elements like maybe a moving boat on the water with lights and wanted to blur them for light trails you could get away with very long shutter speeds. The point in terms of exposure triangle is: you still want adequate depth of field so you'll likely need to stop down from a wide open lens as
@Yezdi suggested above and you still want to keep image noise under control so you don't want a sky high ISO so what's left is running longer shutter speeds but you can get away with that in a shot like this so that's not a real problem.
- In terms of exposure and modes, you can get the same shot in the end via many approaches and what
@Bozz69Z suggests above is a good way to go but for a static composition like this where you have some time to get it right the easy thing in digital cameras is to take a test shot and check either your blinkies (Highlights), your histogram or both to make sure you didn't either clip your highlights (blinkies flashing on image review screen or histogram bunched up with spike to the right hand side) or block up your shadows (histogram bunched up with spike to the left hand side). That really is one huge benefit of digital cameras over the film days, you can immediately check exposure results and if it's too dark (histogram bunched to left) just add some positive exposure compensation or in full manual mode slow down the shutter speed. Or if the image is coming out too bright with clipped highlights just dial in some negative exposure compensation in an auto mode or decrease the shutter speed a bit in full manual mode and take another shot.
- But whether you shoot this in: Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, Manual Exposure with Auto ISO, or Full Manual with Fixed ISO doesn't really matter in the end as long as you check your exposure and make adjustments as necessary and take another shot. If the question is how to nail the exposure in your first shot then the key is to meter (whether Matrix, Center Weighted or Spot) on some part of the image that you want rendered mid tone which admittedly is challenging in a twilight shot with a lot of lights included in the scene but much easier to do in a daylight shot where things like green summer grass is pretty close to midtone and presents a good metering target.
- The other big thing on exposure is that there really isn't a 'correct exposure' for an image like this. I like what you posted but someone else might render it darker so the lights in the image are more prominent (more of a night time shot) and someone else might expose it so the sky and natural light is a bit brighter and it looks closer to daytime. IOW, there's a lot of room for artistic expression with an exposure like this and as long as you don't completely blow out the highlights or block up the shadows to the point where important detail is lost you can vary quite a bit to go for a particular mood. I think the exposure you've shown above works and the scene works though it would work much better if there was more interest (e.g more sunset clouds) in the sky or perhaps with a panorama type crop that included less of the blank sky.
If that doesn't all make sense, for instance the talk of Exposure Triangle or metering modes then I'd suggest Googling those terms and highly recommend Steve's eBook on Nikon Metering:
https://backcountrygallery.com/new-book-exposure-and-metering-for-nikon/ as it explains all this and a lot more in really good detail but in a very approachable way.
BTW, great scene and nice feel to that image. Good on ya for getting out and capturing that image and posting it. Keep 'em coming.
-Dave
