Lighting Adjustments

As the rendering for the scenery is something that I am not 100% happy with, I have decided to try and modify this, as to show more detail in my buildings. When modelling and animating the scenery, the detail in the textures of the buildings is exactly as the bitmaps are, including the colour and bumps. But when it is rendered with the current daylight settings, all of the detail of the buildings and the floor seems to be virtually removed, due to being dazzled in light. As I want my render to allow my textures and scenery to look as similar as possible to what it looks like when I am in the creation stage, the lighting and rendering settings will be reviewed once the animation is completely finished, to see what works best with the camera angles, movement etc.
For now, what I have done is adjusted the self-illumination of my textures that provide the background imagery. As these are simply background images, that shouldn't be affected by my lighting anyway, under the self-illumination tab on the material editor, I have raised the colour to 100. This way, these parts no longer need to be worried about for affecting the lighting of the rest of the scene, such as when one side is covered in shadow.
I will continue to do some research into lighting techniques so that when the animation is complete, I can make the lighting as realistic as possible, but still with detail. I have been reading some books over the break about 3DS Max animation and cameras in general, so I will now continue onto lighting, as I feel this to be one of my weaknesses at the moment in the program.