(Joseph Conrad's wonderfully sinister and evocative 1899 novel)

I remember reading this book in my early teens, and then a few years later being blown away (almost literally) by Francis Ford Coppola's outstanding reworking of Conrad's themes and motifs in Apocalypse Now. Some of those scenes are with me now, as vivid as the day I saw them; and it's a lasting tribute to Conrad that I must have reread Heart of Darkness half-a-dozen times over the years and still get new nuances and meaning from his prose. Favourite line from the film? Has to be "'Never get out of the boat'. Absolutely goddamn right! Unless you were goin' all the way". Don't know why, there are many much more famous lines, but I just love the way Martin Sheen says it...

Also around the same time as the film, was a release by that fine Scottish post-punk band Positive Noise, coincidentally entitled...'Heart of Darkness'! It had wonderfully vague but sinister cover art which was the inspiration for the shot today

For the technical minded of you, this is another lith-treated B&W conversion, very similar to the others this month, the one main difference being that I purposely moved the camera during the exposure to make the blurry effect. File was opened into Camera Raw, Clarity pushed to 100%, Contrast enhanced too. Then into CS3, duplicate layer made and then a B&W Adjustment layer too, this time using the Red Filter preset. Images was flattened, then a Curves Adjustment layer was made; the Red and Green channels were tweaked until I got the effect I was after. Surprisingly, I then added a Diffuse Glow to the Background layer :o). The whole lot was then flattened and resized for the web. Quite how well this shot has worked is up for debate, so please pile in with your comments, good bad and ugly!

Wednesday 6th's don't-go-down-that-spooky-passage-Doug-goodness-knows-what's-lurking-there entry to the Challenge; click here for other monochromed Pbasers in January