Hi, I enjoyed taking this pic - thought I would share my technique. I just received my Cactus v5 flash triggers in the post, so wanted to take some pics for Xmas cards. I had the idea for an ornament in the foreground, and bokeh candles in the background. I like the reindeer's expression, so I wanted to find something for him to look at. After a lot of experimenting, I got the setup I wanted.
The strobist part was actually trickier than I thought. I wanted a constant exposure between the candles and the reindeer, however I also wanted a blacked out background,
and a wide open aperture to get bokeh balls. To stop the flash overpowering the candle light I had to go down to 1/128 power on my Yongnuo YN560II, and used more candles as fill. The umbrella was camera right, and candles left. I only have one flash that will go down this low, so it took a lot of experimenting to get the light soft enough and not too dispersed so as to light the background. Not easy, especially as in the end I went down to 1/30 second. Although this allowed the candle light and flash to mix magically, it did mean I had to brush out some background areas in lightroom and rig up a black blanket in the background. Focusing was tricky, so I used live view and zoomed in, although this in turn made holding the camera steady at 1/30th tricky. Pentax SR really saved the day.
The final problem was white balance - the candle light was much warmer than the flash, even with a full CTO gel. In the end I put a second 1/2 CTO gell on top which made everything match nicely.
Lots of fun had though, happy Christmas all, hope you get lots of camera gear in your stockings!