Ah, the emotive qualities of B+W

When I started taking photography seriously 30 or so years ago, I was developing and printing my own B+W films and prints in a bathroom darkroom. Since then we've had the introduction of digital, and photography has taken off, mostly in the colour realm. Digital cameras often have monochrome shooting options, but often these are low contrast images that require quite a bit of tweaking to get the results that you want.

Here is an example of a shot taken with a d-SLR, in monochrome, and then adjusted in PS to extract and define the image more the way I wanted. It takes about as long as printing your own print, but once you've got it down you don't have to replicate the process again for each subsequent print. That's helpful. There's also no messy chemicals to clean-up or dispose of.