OpenGL lighting small objects?

Question

I'm having a problem with lighting when dealing with really small particles. I'm doing particle-based fluid simulation and am right now rendering the fluid as really tiny polygonized spheres (by really tiny I'm saying about 0.03 units radius for the spheres). The lighting in my scene isn't lighting them how I want and I can't get it to look right. I'm looking for something similar to the soft lighting on the particles in this image...

However my particles look like this...

See how my particles have bright white sections whereas the green particles are just lit up softly and don't have large white hotspots. I know the reason is either the settings for my light or simply the fact that the particles are so small that the light takes up a larger space (is that possible??). My settings for lighting are as follows...

GLfloat mat_ambient[] = {0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 1.0};
GLfloat mat_specular[] = {1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0};
GLfloat mat_shininess[] = {10.0};
GLfloat light_position[] = {0.0, 0.1, p_z, 1.0};
GLfloat model_ambient[] = {0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 1.0};

glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT, GL_AMBIENT, mat_ambient);
glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT, GL_SPECULAR, mat_specular);
glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT, GL_SHININESS, mat_shininess);
glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_POSITION, light_position);
glLightModelfv(GL_LIGHT_MODEL_AMBIENT, model_ambient);

glEnable(GL_LIGHTING);
glEnable(GL_LIGHT0);

glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST);
glShadeModel(GL_SMOOTH);
glColorMaterial(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK,GL_AMBIENT_AND_DIFFUSE);
glEnable(GL_COLOR_MATERIAL);

Answer 1

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone but unfortunately nothing worked. I sat down with my graphics professor and we determined that this problem was in fact related to the size of the particles and the fact that OpenGL treats directional lights as being infinitely far away from any vertex. The proper way to fix it was modifying the constant attenuation of the light source like this...

glLightf(GL_LIGHT0, GL_CONSTANT_ATTENUATION, 10.0);

Now my particles look like this...

which is exactly the lighting I was after!