Wider,
I think the position of your camera, slightly low, to take the second image has not done the effect of the shape any favours.
I can see you were trying to show the faint spalting in the timber and so got close, but (and I'm guessing) the lenses commonly found on digital SLRs (35mm - 70mm) are not particularly suited to close images. Those found on mobile phones are even worse, set to take fairly broad images with a lot of definition.
You'd be better standing back, taking a high def picture from futher away and then trimming (cropping) it down and resizing it to suit the forum, with software.