Fujifilm Instax Mini 8 Underexposed Film Help

[Ceylon]

I recently got my first instax mini 8 camera yesterday and seem to be having troubles trying to take a picture of my cat under the Christmas tree. The pictures are turning out underexposed but there is a lot of light. These are the three failed photos and I was wondering what I could possibly do to fix the lighting problem as well as the red-eye problem (I've tried covering the flash). Thank you for any tips and help. =)

 

[minicoop1985]

Do these things have ANY manual settings?

 

[Ceylon]

Do these things have ANY manual settings?

These are the only settings on the camera.

 

[compur]

The lights from your tree may be fooling your camera's meter into underexposing the scene.

Try turning off the tree lights (but do use the camera's flash).

 

[Derrel]

The photo of the house would be the lens opening and shutter speed setting for indoor photos. The big problem for camera is that what we as people call quote plenty of light is actually a very deep level of photographic lighting requiring a shutter speed typically of 1/30 of one second and the lens aperture of around F 2.8 or so. As Compur said, this is most likely a photo that will need electronic flash in order to be successful. Your dilemma is one that I have encountered many, many times over the past 30 years; we as people see an indoor scene as having plenty of light, but to a camera, plenty of light means something entirely different.

 

[Ceylon]

Thank you so much for the help! Hopefully I can get this looking right.