Would an insect close to the camera be illuminated at night?
I have done theater lighting, and you learn quickly that you can't see how well a given volume of air is lit. You can have every inch of the stage floor brightly lit, and still have an actor stand in the shadows on that very stage. (Stage magicians employ this effect to make big things disappear.) Conversely, you can have a camera pointed at something dark, and still have the air in front of the camera be very well lit. (Maybe you've seen flash photography at night: the subjects close to the camera are well lit, while the background is still dark.)
We get the illusion that everything is dark because we don't see any light, but you can't really see light when you're looking at it sideways. (This is why laser traps in heist movies etc. used to need smoke or fog to make them visible- nowadays they're just CGI, of course.) So you can have a brightly lit volume of air in front of the camera that you can't see, but any insect or bat that flies through that is still going to be well lit.
(Another example is brightly lit satellites on a dark night sky, or even the moon. It's hard to intuitively grasp that the moon is in bright sunlight when the whole night sky looks so dark.)