Many photographers, such as myself, initially learned on 35mm black and white film. Black and white still holds a special place in my heart. Although modern dSLRs take color pictures by default, color pictures can be converted to black and white by any number of techniques. Whether you choose to do in camera conversion or conversion in software in post, all that inevitably matters is that you get the look you want. I choose to take the software conversion route. The advantage of converting in post is whether you take the image intending to be black and white or simply stumble on it in post as a result of playing around, you always have the original color image if you want it. Awhile ago I purchased the Nik Software Complete Collection which is a plug in collection for Lightroom, Aperture, and Photoshop. One of the included plug ins is Silver Efex Pro, a black and white conversion tool. I have been playing around with it more and I think its pretty fantastic. You have a lot of control over the look of your conversion, from film stock emulation to tone curve control to the hue of the paper. Lots of control can be kinda intimidating but it's a good thing in the end. When we're talking "shades of gray", more subtle changes are often needed to get the look you want or to make your image stand out. Subtle changes require finer control over the parameters of your image that you manipulate. Below are some examples that I played around with tonight for your enjoyment. If you would like to try out Silver Efex Pro, trial software downloads can be found at Nik Softwares website here. The current software version is Silver Efex Pro 2.0, the examples below were created in 1.0.
Camera: Nikon D7000
Lens: Nikon AF-S VR Micro-NIKKOR 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED
workflow:
-pictures taken as .NEF sRGB and converted to .DNG using Adobe DNG converter
-.DNG files imported into Adobe Lightroom v2.7
-initial contrast/exposure/hue/cropping performed in Lightoom
-black and white conversion and processing done with Nik Silver Efex Pro 1.0 Lightroom Plug-in
-watermark created with Adobe Illustrator CS5 and added to picture as smart object in Adobe Photoshop CS5