Hi Darryl,
Photographers can use people in all sorts of ways, and in this instance I would have been inclined to have used someone (preferably not a small one) to help me improve the look of this photograph.
The problem that you have in this photo is that the theodilite is getting about the same amount of light that the background is getting, and because the background has a warm colour to it, is definitely getting all the attention.
Now here is where you get to use the “not so small” person… get them to stand in a position where they will cast a shadow over the background, but not the theodilite. This will make the theodolite appear brighter while making the background darker and less distracting.
In the image below I actually applied a quick dose of HDR (High Dynamic Range) treatment in Photoshop (I used the Photorealistic preset), then I added the old layer back over the top again and use a mask to keep the old background and the new foreground.
I then used a Lasso tool to select that porthole in the upper left of the picture and, after hitting the delete button I let 'Content Aware Fill' fix up the image automatically for me.
Cheers,
Anthony
Image Doctor's edited version
