having a go at BW photography

i'm pretty new to this. any tips about improving BW conversions? some crit i recieved today was that it's better to create more contrast for BW so i had a go at "improving" on something i already had but i'd like to hear more...

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Looks nice and moody but I think some of the sky is blown. Can you pull those down a bit?

Agree about blown out sky and also the details in the darker area are missing. I guess if you could post original, some of us could give it another shot.

Also you lost all of the detail in the black and gray areas. I can't imagine all that "black" is "black". You also want to move your subject off of the center of the image.

thanks for your comments. really appreciate you taking your time to reply.

this was the "original" (it's what i brought out of ACR). initially i didn't do a lot of changes except slightly adjust the levels but i was told that it's too "grayish" and there needs to be a greater distinction between the white areas and black areas. i guess i overdone it as it is true that detail was lost in both black and white areas.

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Not sure what "too grayish" means, but I can see that the range is limited. Did you shoot the original in B&W? For the future I suggest capturing everything in RAW, its easy to convert it to B&W afterwards.

Yes, you did lose some of the darker details, but I actually like the range of the 2nd image than the 1st, but I like the crop on the 1st image.

The original in post #5 is much better than the edit in post #1. The original histogram is:

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