i was just wondering...i noticed when i move my "camera" back from a red colored sphere which has light shining on a portion of it, the light begins to cover the entire sphere as i move back, then it goes back to normal, then the sphere lights all the way up, then it goes back to normal, etc. etc. as long as i keep moving back. any reason why its doing this? i know that when two faces lie on eachother very closely this type of thing occurs. could it possibly be the size of the sphere?

Not sure, but my guess is that the normals are not being clamped between 0 and 1, in which case changing the angle of view will do weird things to the light intensity. Moving further away from the polygon will change the angle of view.

Look at glEnable(GL_NORMALIZE) and glEnable(GL_RESCALE_NORMAL).

ok ill do that. thanks.