Christmas Time Comes but Once a Year

I've only got three photos to show you from Christmas. The main focus of this Christmas' photography was flash. I took several exposures of the same scene (the second one shown) with different flash settings/levels to try to get the right mix of flash and ambient light. Also, my flash died suddenly after only two exposures on Christmas day, leaving me with only one usable photo. This is very unsettling.

This first photo is of my mother's Christmas tree. It was taken using natural light. Thing that I like about this photo are the nice contrast between the bright lights and the dark tree. Also, I feel like I did an adequate job of framing the photo. Unfortunately, the light distribution of the tree isn't very even, so the top of the tree is slightly under exposed. I really think that I can live with that, given the situation. Another thing that I noticed was that a 100% crop of the photo showed a lot of what looked like noise. It couldn't have been noise because I was shooting ISO 200, but who knows. I'm going to temporarily blame it on the kit lens.

This second photo is of the entire living room. Here is where I took several exposures of the identical scene using different amounts of flash. I really like the end product. I ended up using mainly natural light, and bouncing a weak flash off the right wall to 'fill' the darker right corner of the room. The result? I feel like it's an adequately even photo.

This last photo is where all of the trouble started. I took two frames of the ladies in this pose (the first shot, I forgot to set my white balance, so they turned out blue... rookie mistake). I imediately liked the result on the camera's LCD after this shot. It's a good thing that I liked it though, as the flash did not fire on the next pose, or any pose thereafter. This has happened to me once before where my old Sunpak flash just 'stops working' every once in a while. I don't know if it has to do with the batteries or what (pressing the test button still discharges the flash just fine). Anyhow, to make a long story short, I was forced to slap my FA50 f1.4 on and go to ISO 1600 for the remainder of my shots. That wouldn't have been the end of the world really, the DL takes pretty good photos even at that high of an ISO. Unfortunately, 50mm was WAY too long for anything but headshots, given the size of the room we were in. I needed something more like a 35mm or shorter to get the shots that I wanted (not that it mattered, the shots that i really 'wanted' were flash exposed shots). The moral of the story here? My Sunpak flash is less than trustworthy. I have been kicking around the idea of upgrading to a more 'modern' flash for a while now, but instead I think that I'm going to invest in some PC cables and try to do a little off-camera flash shooting.