A couple of days ago, Brian Auer posted a project on his blog where he invited people to use a photograph that he would supply and process it in Photoshop (or any other image editing software). The idea was to see how different people take an image and work on it.
Brian was kind enough to give us the option of starting from the original RAW file from his camera as long as we reminded ourselves time and time again that we did not own the photograph, but were only borrowing in for purposes of this project.