Ken,
nice to hear from you again. and even nicer to see some of your work.
one suggestion about your photos. If I had taken these as they appear on my monitor. My first thought was the background was to bright for the auto settings on the camera. It's compinsating the exposure to much to capture the detail in the pens. You can go with a darker background, I have found grey or blue to work well with my camera. or If you can set you camera to underexpose by a step or two experiment with that. many cameras also have an exposure weighting setting. it will read several spots in the view finder and expose for the average of these or you can have it expose for what is just in the center of the view finder. on my camera this is called spot metering for just the center, adn field metering for the average throughout the viewfinder. hope that makes since. the way I got used to how my camera acts wos to take one pen and take a pictures of it on white paper. that way I knew what the background color was supposed to be. then I took one picture for every setting ont he camera keeping a note bok of what the settings where.
in one of the series for artificial light compinsation. the paper showed up everything from a little off white to a peach color. with lots of yellow tones if the setting was not right. and that was just one setting. the others such as the metering for the exposure. wether you are set on landscape, portrate, or whatever will alter the photo almost as much. having the photo series' really helped me trouble shoot what wasn't set up right. was it the lighting setting, the exposure setting etc.
sorry this is so long and hope something helps.