You will need a high contrast photo to start with but this photo almost certainly has been post processed in Photoshop or similar. Its not too hard to do if you are familiar with PS and post processing but its a bit daunting if you are not. In any event assuming you have t least some basic PS skills you may want to try the following:
1) open the photo in PS and increase contrast on the main subject and if necessary paint over any lighter areas within the darker margins (and conversely paint over any darker areas in the lighter background) until iyou have an image that is near to pure black against a lighter background (barring of course the glowing cigarette end).
If you want to get fancy and know how to do it, you could use the channels option in PS to divide the image into red, green and blue channels and select whichever channel works best to achieve the above - basically you want something that is more or less a mask with a main image thats nearly pure blacks and a background that is nearly pure white.
2) You may then want to tone this as presumably you do not want pure black and white in the final image - using the split tone tool in PS should work here. Select different tones for the lighter areas and the darker areas. You will need to experiment. The background looks like it has a kind of flesh colour tone and the dark are looks like it has a touch of green in it (??)
3) The image also looks very much as if there is a texture layer over the top. You can download textures for PS (most of them are just jpg images.) Search in Google for "photoshop grunge textures" and this will lead you to thousands, if not millions. I have hundreds downloaded and use them from time to time. For example in the image at the bottom of this post.
4) Import the texture as a new layer (I use Corel Paintshop Pro which has sightly different commands and I cannot recall what the command is for Photoshop but it should not be too hard.)
5) Once thee texture is applied over the base image as a new layer, you can try a couple of things. First experiment with layer blending modes to see how the layers interact. This is what I think they have done in your image. Also try adjusting the layer opacity so more of the bottom layer shows through. Use the slider to adjust between 0 and 100% till you are happy.
6) If there are parts of the image where you do not want the texture (like the glowing tip of the cigarette) you could apply a layer maks and paint the texture layer out where you do not want it.
There are almost certainly other ways to achieve this effect but the above would be the one I would try first.
_DSC5260A by
yoyomaoz, on Flickr
