thank you all for your kind words. Unleash comments and critiques are always welcome with me.
As far as the lighting goes, the grey image i used Mental Ray, with Final Gathering, Global Illumination, and Image Based Lighting (aka hdri)
my lighting will need a lot of work and touching up on down the road, but i wanted a solid place to start. the lighting will change quite a bit once i start adding my textures. right now it's pretty much just the default lambert shader on all the objects... the scene will look completely different once i add textures, bump maps, specularity, reflections, etc...
The white image i used a mental ray shader called mib_amb_occlusion
it basically creates self shadowing or some such thing...i'm not entirely sure how to explain the shader :s, i'm using it to help show the details in the models
anyways, I guess i'll keep posting up my progress as i kinda get to the "next stage" of things...