
The idea here is simple, the dramatic mood of the scene is provided courtesy of some dramatic lighting, which was created with the help of HONL's Speed Grids. I had both Speedlights (SB-900 and SB-800) placed at camera left. The SB-900 had the 1/8 speed grid on and was pointed down at the subject, and set to -1.7EV via the on-camera SB-800. The SB-800 had the 1/4 speed grid on and was pointed at the table, set to -2.3EV, just enough to see a bit of the table. You can see the setup shot here:

The RAW file was converted to TIF via Capture NX, with additional use of Nik's Color Efex Pro 3.0.