Personally I'd go digital as most cameras have a black and white setting so you can see how the finished product will look.  Sometimes a scene you think will look good black and white will simply look grey due to a lack of contrast.
just a thought is all.....

I think nowadays it might be a question of whatever film you can get!  😀

I used a few rolls of Ilford FP4 and liked the results but be thoughtful about what paper you ask it to be printed on. I actually went for a low contrast paper and liked the results.

Or do it yourself of course, great fun and watching a print materialise is just magical!

Cheers,
Steve

I quite like black and white photos but as previously mention some of my tried landscapes have looked rather dull and grey.

I have tried Portraits and nude studies and they have been very striking.

Good luck.

with digital cameras the way they are these days that is a really good option, you dont have to have a compact either, you can get ones with different lenses etc.
then use a good editing programme! black and white, sepia, watercolours etc are all there to alter your picture, i know its cheating a little, but if you dont like how a picture looks, change it back!
personally i would love to be able to use photoshop properly!

I've not really got my head round Photoshop. I need to spend more time with it. I use Photoscape. See see here

It free and easy to use, but no layers. It will bring out the best of many photos taken. It includes some usful extra too, like screen capture and face recognition

Davie  8)

Having done both in the days of silver halides, as Eva has found out, black and white can be tricky. I'd endorse the fact that composition and lighting for each medium is quite different. That's why you can't really just take out the chroma in a colour pic and have a good B&W one.  Sometimes it works well, most often not without some extensive Photoshop work.

Whilst purists still maintain that film is best and digital is just trickery, I was astonished to find that our local camera club is virtually 100% digital and up to its armpits in Photoshop. And the results they get are superb. Mind you, having paddled around in noxious chemicals in the dark for many years I can't say that I blame them.

Don't despair about Photoshop. Yes, it's probably the best out there but the thing is it's got so many hundreds of features that you'll never learn them all anyway. And if you did, you'd find that if you don't keep using them, you'll forget anyway. Ive been using it for 15 years and still haven't used a quarter of its capability.  But for fine control using layers and layer effects, you just can't beat it. 

Ok, so the full version is expensive, but Photoshop elements has most of the 'most used' features and is affordable for many.

I used various black and white films for many, many years - developing and printing in my home darkroom.  There are many good films out there (still).  I kind of preferred the Ilford films myself (and I'm in the US).  Nowadays I'm 100% digital - much more flexibility.  I shoot in RAW - which by definition is color capture, but some images work better in monochrome.  Many software programs can make the conversion and there are some specialty plug-ins, such as SilverEfex Pro that do an incredible job of conversion. You can even simulate the look of various B&W films.  Some images just look better in monochrome!

Whenever I see purists saying film is better it makes me smile.  Film is different but not better.

"we didn't have photoshop and computers back in the day".  No - but if it had been available you would have used it 🙂

We might not have had Photoshop but we did a lot of the same things. We pushed or held film in the Dev (not unlike Levels), we dodged and shaded under the enlarger, we chose either soft or hard papers, we did mattes and cutouts. And we did it all a dark red and sometimes chemically noxious little room.  Would we do it again if we had the choice. Ah, good question. Lol.

Exactly. digital has enabled us to get more from photography. You can never capture the perfect image in the camera - that's only the beginning.

I agree with Cherry and John, as I too would dodge and burn and I often cut out unwanted back grounds like the tree growing out of my dads head, he-he-he.

To correct such mistakes or enhance your photos is much easier now with Photoshop.

With my current camera I can set it to B&W and can also select a filter, red, orange, etc and I can set my printer to use black ink only and have been very pleased with some photos.