trouble with texturing

I'm experiencing a problem right now with the texturing of this battery character. It seems that the textures on the side of the shape get a disproportionately large degree of shadow, as shown in the examples below. The first example is a render region, the second is a screen shot, of the same object. The texture doesn't show up in the render region.
After some exploration I discovered that the issue might have something to do with implicit/explicit texturing.



*fixed the problem with some learning about basic lighting, see more recent posts.