Problem with taking pictures in the shadows

In very simple terms you simply didn't have enough aperture and sensor sensitivity to get the same exposure in the camera as you got with your eyes. The blurring was caused by camera movement while the shutter was open, hand held anything over about 1/15th of a second will be unusable at your shortest focal length. Night photos are hard as they require maximum aperture to let in enough light, and maximum aperture means minimum depth of field so if you are close to the subject it is hard to get all of it in focus. You can increase the ISO setting, but that introduces noise into the shot. As you noticed using flash completely destroys the interesting lighting you were trying to capture. With a proper external flash you would have got a shot as though it were daytime, with a small inbuilt flash you just forced the camera to take a short exposure with a small aperture without adding enough flash light to get the exposure, hence the black picture. As it was a static subject you could have tried a long exposure with the camera on a trpod, possibly using the self timer to start the shot so that you did not touch the camera at all. Another area to take care with is colour/white balance. Your eyes are very good at adjusting for any colour cast or hue in the illumination. You will notice that a sheet of white paper looks white to you inside under normal lights, or inside under flourescent lighting, or outside in daylight . You will find that your camera has to be preset for the colour/temperature of the illumination, to get this right you need to know the spec of the flood lights (halogen, tungsten etc) as it is unlikely the automatic white balance will get this right, being less sophisticated than the human eye/brain combination . You can of course adjust the white balance in who editing software. I hope this helps....