If you shoot a poorly lit area at night with no flash and no tripod with a conventional camera, you get either a horrible blur, or a black square. With a digital camera, it may be better to opt for the black square, as it turns out that you can still recover some information with digital level adjustment, even from this, shot at ISO400 (which is the best you can expect from conusmer film or compact digital cameras, even good ones such as the Canon Powershot G6) with a 1/8s exposure time at f/5.6.

This shot was actually taken with the Canon EOS 20D, simulating those limits for reference.

Update: I tried recovering this image again using my latest software acquisitions, Adobe Photoshop CS 8.0 and Noise Ninja, and managed to come up with an even more impressive result.