Thanks Bill, Juergen, and Bjorn for for the comments.
Juergen, back in the day, I actually shot an old Wista 8x10 field camera for fun.
Bjorn, when I first got into digital photography, the first thing I concentrated on was how to make good B&W images with the digital files. Coming from a background of almost exclusively using B&W film for my personal work, this was very important to me.
For anyone who is interested, my process is very simple. I use Nik SilverEfx, and then it is just a matter of selective contrast control and burning and dodging- the same tools I used in my darkroom for years and years to make silver prints. However, for this particular shot, I used a small sample of HDR- just enough to open the shadows a bit. After viewing the image with HD and without, it seemed to only make a slight difference, mostly in the shadow area. I doubt if this will become a tool that I use much at all. Just experimenting a bit here and there.
