Huxley, FG video was uber! Thanks it makes sense to me know!

PS- I jave a general lighting question about area lights.

In my attempt the duplicate the FG vid I replaced the polycube with luminesence with an area light and discovered something strange.

I created a nurb plane and applied a dark blue lambert shader to it. Above the nurb plane I created a sphere and applied a bright red blinn shader to it. Then above the sphere I created a single area light with default settings. I pressed the 7 key and the seen appeared to be lighted but...

when I did a default settings render the result was totally black?!? Then I fiddled with various settings and use maya software, maya hardware and mental ray and no matter what I did the scene with just an area light was always just totally nlack as though there was no light at all? If tried al the other type lights one at a time and they all rendered fine but any scene I tried an area light in by it self was total blackness.

Do I have a bug with Maya and area lights on my machine or is there some magic incantasion I need to learn to make area lights have an effect on a scene?

I am a newb with maya so sorry if my questions seen dumb.