The unfired round could use a little post-processing sharpening, most likely due to the resizing of the image.
The placement and orientation of the round could lead to lots of things.
The pistol is noticeably outside the focus depth of field, presumably on purpose.
The lighting and shadows are good. Good job on minimizing the shine/glare of the gun.

yes, the handgun is out of focus on purpose.
LOL, maybe I should have used a new round.

But maybe a fired-vs-unfired round. Obviously a fired bullet is difficult to retrieve, but you can buy them separately at stores that sell reloading supplies or very carefully separate them yourself. Depends on the end result you are looking for.

there are some where the round is brighter. The round was what the lens focused on.
I have to re-shoot anyway. Much tighter. I lose too many megs by the time the photo is edited. I am very new to all this. I just started taking still shots last week. A long way to go.
Thanks.

As for the brightness of the round, you do have some choices in color: brass and nickle(? silverish). Brass is the more common.
There is also clean vs dirty.

Should be able to knock the tarnish off it without much elbow grease, if that's what you want. I hope you post your next try on this - I'd like to follow your progress.

I noticed last night that I worked on making an image more brilliant and uploaded it to photbucket. When I saw what uploaded it was dull compared to the original on my Mac.

Most web-related stuff expects the pics to be in the "sRGB" space, not the "Adobe RGB" space. Not all browsers do the conversions yet.
Since all the EXIF data has been removed, I cannot say for sure this is the problem.

I've done a lot of stuff on black backgrounds, but I'm going to try white this year. Any advice?

It's cheap and it works well. I cheated with this one because I used paint in gimp to whiten the background.

looks plastic