[Zig]

Firstly, let me qualify the image: I'm in no way exhibitionistic and don't regard myself as photogenic; I'm even more uncomfortable with the idea of any part of me being publicly visible below the face.
I was taking some naff pics of myself for a forthcoming holiday, then just decided to take my shirt off on a couple of spare frames, basically because I wanted to investigate a possible digi-version of the time-honoured darkroom/filmmakers' technique of bleach-bypassing.
This darkroom technique, lately retro-contemporary (!), basically involves developing the film without the bleaching process, leaving the silver to degrade. A more simple explanation is the "Saving Private Ryan" look: gritty, grainy, contrasty and under-saturated. With monochromes, one can get a contrasted, chiselled...almost metallic look that is quite striking in male portraiture.
I decided, with myself as guinea-pig, to give this a go in CS2: a trimmed-down modus operandi would be contrast-boost, gamma messabout, grain layer and/or layered desaturation perhaps in overlay mode. The best that this can hope for is "reasonable-faux", as with the real darkroom deal there are subtle changes in shadow areas.
Now, I realise Nik's do a reasonable version of this technique(and their grain is really well done)...but I can't justify spending over a ton(GBP) on Silver FXPro, particularly as I've enough nous and bits in CS2 to do it myself.
Here's my own version.
In order to start off with as much detail before "degradation", I banged the contrast as low as possible in my initial raw-tiff conversion.
Here I deliberately pushed things to the extreme in terms of darkness and contrast; as details disappeared, I helped them along with a soft black brush.
This was actually taken in my garden, with 10 secs on the timer, the 70-200 set to about 120mm, in early evening, with the focus a total guess.
(Sorry: that's 111mm, ISO 800 and not a 10 sec exposure of course)