iron furnace, advice needed

here's a pic i took yesterday from inside an old iron furnace. i like the way it turned out except how bright it is at the grate. how could i have avoided this? a smaller aperture? looking for advice and criticism.

Nice concept. I would think that with the grate area being the light source, the only thing to do would be to bring in some light from the bottom. Then you could expose or pp to darken the stonework.

When you have too much difference between dark and high light, the better way is HDR to bring up what 's in the light like in your case.

bracketing 2-3 pics with different exposure compensation to the left ( of the histogram ) like that you keep your dark area ( if you like it ), and you bring back all the matters from the high light.
I f your camera don't do it, you can merge these 2-3 pictures with photoshop or GIMP or any photography software, even DPP do it

Both of the above suggestions will "work". Otherwise, if you "expose for the highlight" (the grate) the rest of the shot will be seriously under-exposed, not what I would want!

For the shot you posted, in post-processing do your best to bring down the highlights, if you have software that is good for that!

In the future, shooting in Raw and using a good Raw processor can help a lot to "tame" the highlights!