Tripod's the right way to go. Inspired from a shot, I got myself a new tripod and a nice Arca-Swiss L bracket for my M. But I knew before receiving the tripod that I'm not the kind of person to stroll around with a tripod. Just doesn't fit my style and as much as I appreciate the reasons (technical as well as compositional) to use a tripod, I'm a handheld shooter at heart.
Here's the picture that inspired me to get a tripod.
35 mm, f/2, 1/4 sec, ISO 3200
Kneeled down, I was very happy to get a 1/4s steady shot. But because of the DR of the scene, there's a lot of banding and other issues come up in post-processing.
For cityscapes and night time shooting in general the best thing is to have an "ISO-less" sensor that you could happily leave at base ISO and do all the pushing in post.
PS. While I definitely want to photograph in dark conditions, it's not often that I go. So going for big-bucks Leica cameras that improve that 3% portion of my photography while not improving the 90% portion hardly at all also speaks for keeping my M240 as the rangefinder of choice.
