What's the camera, anyway? I'm assuming it is a DSLR of some type, or maybe a G9 or one of its ilk?

The thing to not about DSLRs, is they often default to shoot with no tweakage to the image. A point and click will apply some contrast adjustment, sharpening and saturation to the image before it bakes the jpg. A DSLR will often not do anything to the image under the assumption that you are most likely going to be doing these things after the fact. If you are just planning on taking the pic, you might want to go look for these settings (on a Canon 20D, it's under parameters), and adjust them so you have a bit more contrast, sharpening and saturation in an image.

It is a Canon D60. A bit of an older model. It only does what I tell it to as far as I know. I only shoot in manual.

You really want to see my pics??
I'll try to organize and resize enough of them to put up on CT.
So much work!