Importance of Exposure & Using it Creatively

The moon looks cool tonight, so I thought I would take a shot of it.  I put my settings at what would be a proper exposure according to the camera, when metering just to the side of the moon on the sky.  These would have been better if I had a zoom lens to make the moon really big.  My settings were

50mm f/1.4 ss 1/80 ISO 1600

Now, here is the same shot but with the exposure upped quite a bit.

50mm f/1.4 ss 1/30 ISO 6400

It looks almost like it's daylight. I like this, but it's a little too much.

So, I dropped the exposure a bit. It is still really overexposed around the moon, but I like it better since it doesn't look like noon instead of night.

50mm f/1.4 ss 1/25 ISO 1600

As with these examples, in my opinion, the "correct" exposure, may not be the best one. And sometimes you need to have a little bit of a blown area to get a creatively good exposure. :)