http://www.devmaster.net/articles/viewing-systems/ I've been reading that and the Cameral Class tutorial on NEHE and I'm just trying to understand the theory here. Basically there is a kind of matrix in opengl that defines what opengl considers up down left right near far etc. The x, y, z. Transformations, rotations and even gluLookAt all modify the world with that original set of axis in mind. What a camera class is trying to do is load a completely new definition of the world, I imagine using glLoadMatrix or glMultMatrix. Is this the proper way of understanding how a camera will work ? Ive been using some clever calculus on gluLookAt, which transforms the world properly but leaves me with something of a "flashlight view" when what I want is a kind of "world lighting" so that I will on some occasions, see the dark side of some objects.

As far as I know, a camera is an object that translates the SCENE so you can see the scene itself from adifferent point of view... said that, I can explain what my camera class does:
every frame, my engine updates modelview matrix, translating and rotating the scene according to camera position/rotation... obviusly, if camera moves left, the scene must be traslated on the right, and the same is for rotations: scene must be translated/rotated on the opposide side of camera position/rotation... I mean, placing the camera in (-1,0,0), moves the scene at (1,0,0)...
So, returning to your question, yes, a camera is an object that manipulates modelview matrix :P

About lights, it seems you are not updating light position after setting your camera... if you don't do that, you should see the scene like a miner with a light on the helmet :P

I don't know of a way to move the light though.

1) I'm not sure how the math works.

2) I dont konw how to actually set a position for the light once its been enabled in the initialization.

Any thoughts ?

1. Really really bad! :P
2. In the same way you initialize it... Oo