Hi,
I have recently been trying to make a flower in Blender 2.71 that glows. i have modeled the flower just fine, got it to emit light, and have a “glow” effect. However when i get this “glow” effect i lose most of the detail in the flower.
It looks like you changed your shader to an emit shader. The emit shader won’t let you see anything behind it. I would try mixing the emit shader with whatever shader you used in the first image
Try changing the threshold value to only work from the brightest part. Do this in non mix mode. That is mix with original -1 you should see then how much glow you want. Also you can composite the glow with the original using mix nodes. This may give you better control.