(Richard Brautigan writes the most surreal and funniest of books...)

Brautigan was another of my childhood literary heroes - his surreal and yet completely acceptable novels struck a chord with me, especially his early books - 'Trout Fishing in America', 'In Watermelon Sugar' and 'The Hawkline Monster - A Gothic Western' were my favourites, and ones which I would read again and again. Terrific stuff!

So here we were having a mooch around the very beautiful Hailes Church yesterday, collecting portfolio pics for Finn's A Level Photography while Naomi mucked out the beast. I turned round, and there was Finn just gazing into space*...a quick grab shot, but I think this works - there's a certain detachment about it I like.

Not a complex one this - RAW file into ACR, reduced Clarity and boosted Brightness; I also put in a custom Curve. Then into CS3 and duplicated the layer - I made a selection of the glass of the shades, and converted that to B&W via tweaking the High Contrast Red Filter; inverting the selection, I converted the rest of the pic to B&W via a tweak of the Green preset - this double B&W conversion gave a nice clear image of the sunspecs as well as smoothing out the main subject. I flattened the image, then created two duplicate layers - the first I changed the Blending Mode to Screen, the second to Multiply. I reduced the Opacity of the Multiply layer to around 75% - this let some of the highlights through from the Screen layer below (I reduced the Screen layer's Opacity to around 80%). Lastly, I selected the 'in focus' area around Finn's face and Smart Sharpened that (65% at 2px), and then resized for the web.

Monday 25th's otherworldly entry to the Challenge; click here for other monochromed Pbasers in January

*He was actually contemplating a shot, not being a typical vacant teenager!!!