First of all, thanks for the interesting discussion on my previous entry, regarding the merits of conventional photography versus taking an approach more closely oriented towards the post-production of the initial capture. It's not a new argument, and not one that's likely to be resolved at any point soon, if ever, but it's an interesting topic nonetheless.

Anyway, in light of that discussion, here's a shot where the original does a much better job of standing on its own merits:

.../archives/pipeline.php

Personally, I prefer the final version – it's moodier, and more about the structure and composition than the contrasting colours – but do feel free to disagree ;) The black and white conversion was done using the Channel Mixer (as described in this tutorial), then the image was toned using a Curve (as discussed here).

And in case you're wondering, this was shot with a polariser, hence the much darker sky in the top-right corner of the image.

Oh, and on a totally different matter, we're running a competition today to win a lifetime membership (and some hefty discounts) to our Photoshop tutorials. If you're interested, there's some further information here:

http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/online/competition.php