Not to totally hijack this thread, but with b&w photography, what kind of look should a photographer be aiming for? Do you aim for high contrast? Low contrast? If I shoot RAW, and I'm quickly editing in Lightroom, how do you know which of the 8 coloured greyscaled mixers to fiddle around with? In colour, I'm not completely dissatisfied with what I'm doing (although I don't know if others agree or not).
To me, it seems that many portraits are either very low contrast, or very high contrast with lots of shadows. Landscape shots usually appear low contrast to me, except for the very dark areas of the photo. I thought maybe the highlight end would have a longer "tail", while the darker regions didn't. Does this question/remark make sense?