Sometimes black and white creates magic!

I took this rather serious portrait shot of Ben Sunday night, and of course the original file is in full, beautiful color. But there’s some magic in black and white photos, and once I converted this one and saw it, I decided this is one of those.

For anyone interested, I did the conversion in Lightroom 3.2 by reducing the saturation and vibrance each to -75 to remove nearly but not quite all of the color and increasing clarity to 75 to increase the contrast. I picked up this b&w recipe from something I saw on the web, and I think it works great.