Roel & Danno - Thanks to both of you for your feedback on the processing. The high-contrast version is a good alternative, and I understand your preference for it. And I always appreciate anyone who takes the time to edit one of my photos to show me an alternative take.
I'll take a little trip down memory lane to explain my choices. I was attempting to emulate a photograph rather than a newspaper print. I grew up in Mississippi in the 60s in a newspaper family so I cut my photography teeth on news photography of that era. Those jail cells had very dim lighting, usually a single hanging bulb in the hall outside the cell block. The few windows were high, small and deeply recessed. The only way you'd get a photo at all was to sneak your camera in as a visitor, with the kind of film you'd use at a high school football game, and leave the flash off. The result would be murky, with poor focus and limited DOF. If anyone were brave enough to publish it, it would be halftoned via a rotograving machine before being affixed to a wood block and locked into the flatbed letterpress amid type that was set in hot metal on a linotype and headlines set hot in a Ludlow. By the time I was 13 I could do all of it except the linotype and the press.
Your ideas about increasing contrast have made me think of doing up a halftone in PS. That would produce a more contrasty but even less detailed version that looked something like a 1964 newspaper. By the early 70s, everyone was going offset, and the process and output changed. My most interesting photo collection is from our family's old Herald archives from the 60s. It's a window into life in small-town Mississippi during that very troubled era - the good, the bad and the ugly.
