C&C please

[Idahophoto]

I have always like this miner they put up in memory of the Sunshine Mine Disaster in 1972. It was looking fairly shabby but glad to see it got a new paint job finally. I think the photo turned out well, it's been shot a million times in daylight so I decided to have my go with it at night for something different. I really hate the shadow next to the names, but could not find away to get rid of it. That's not me and could not get it out when shot but felt I could PS it out easy. Wrong. My Photoshop skills are still really noobish.

I cloned out the fence the best I could going in real small portions, but had trouble with the pole as it covered a much larger area so it made it much harder to find suitable areas to clone from. I then used a real small spot healer to blend in the rough spots. Fortunately, most of it was rock so I think it blends in fairly well.

Hope you all like it, I'm sorry about the large file size but wanted you to be able to see better the areas I cloned at, and the main point of the statue is to honor the people who died in the mine by listing there names, so I wanted to do the same and make sure they could be read. Any advise greatly appreciated.

 

[Buckster]

The cloning looks fine to me.

The bright light isn't working for me though. You might try positioning yourself so that it's behind the statue, which might give it a nice rim light effect instead.

To deal with the shadow on the plaque, you can try an off-camera flash with a scrim to limit its effect to just the plaque area. Since the scene doesn't move, you might even be able to paint it with light from a strong flashlight during a longer exposure. Maybe you can set up a reflector to use the strong light source behind the statue (or the one making the shadow) to light it up. Just a couple of ideas to think about.