Here's a portrait that was taken on an overcast day using available light. I used the 'cloudy' whitebalance setting on the camera which added warm tones to the photograph. There is often a bluish tinge to photos taken in low light, especially on such an overcast day with no external lights.

I took this photograph with Stan standing in front of a white door background. I asked him to look 'mean' and to take a bouncer's stance. I wanted a moody emotion and I definitely got it! It also has a lot of texture which can be intensified when the photo is desaturated. The light and shadows are also enhanced. This is how I did it. First, we need to do some housekeeping. Skip to the next step if you have this covered.

1. Backing up your original photo. I usually save as .psd (photoshop file) or as tif. Many people prefer to shoot in RAW and convert to tiff files. Why do this? One good reason is that when a tif photo is manipulated there is no loss of quality when you save the photo, especially when you save more than once. It was explained to me that each time you save a jpg file it is compressed slightly which can cause artefacts and noise in the resulting images. It's also helpful to have a master or backup file

2. Open your tiff and create a duplicate layer from the background. This makes it easy to compare between original and edited version plus you can always delete the new layer if you don't like the edits. It also comes in handy if you like to use layer adjustments (color dodge, overlay, screen etc) and then moderate the effect of the adjustment by making the top layer opaque (increase the opacity or reduce the fill %.

Next do an Auto Layers adjustment by selecting the layer then choosing Image>Adjustment> Auto Levels

Auto Color

Now you may want to desaturate. One of the quickest ways is to select the Channels pallette and click to the right of the name of the colour (red, blue or green)

Another easy method is to use the desaturate Image>Adjustment>Desaturate

Next step is usually to adjust the Contrast or use Shadows/ Highlights

The change when Shadow/Highlight is selected may not be what you wanted. This was what was automatically selected. It is now time to experiment with the sliders until you get what you want.

Add some contrast

And for a moody look, click on the curve and drag like shown in the image below.

I added the sepia colour treatment because I thought it gave the photograph a vintage feel and the focus became the light and shadows.

The depth of field was achieved mostly by accident. I had been taking photographs of flowers with a +10 FoxFoto macro / Close up lens set on and couldn't figure out why some of the photos were so blurry. I think it makes for an interesting photograph.

Camera: Fujifilm FinePix S5600
Exposure: 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture: f/4.5
Focal Length: 6.3 mm
ISO Speed: 400
Exposure Bias: 0/100 EV
Flash: Flash did not fire

More properties on the original photo's exif page.