I'm not feeling the metal of the slide at all. What sort of material is it supposed to be? If its a highly reflective material, you need to darken your diffuse and bring that out with your spec/reflection. Shiny metals are not bright because they have a bright diffuse, but because they are highly reflective.
@jordan: thanks. @garagebay: thanks, those images really helped out. @roostermap: its a realtime shot (aside from the one with DOF). using 3point shader, standard 3 point light setup. reflections are one of the .dds files found from Laurens Corijn's site. for the most part on the shader i didnt mess with too many settings…