Why does night photography require the use of manual controls while daytime photography can get by with Auto Mode?
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Light meters have traditionally worked by determining “middle grey” which is halfway between pure white and pure black. If you expose a photo in the daytime based on middle grey, you’ll have some areas that are bright and some that are dark. That’s what we expect to see in the daytime.
But at night, we expect that most things will be dark. If we expose for middle grey, most things will look unnaturally bright.
So at night, you have to tell the camera that you expect less light to be present. You can do that with manual controls or with a camera’s night mode.
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