Outsider

@Gary: Yes, I processed this one as HDR. It's been awhile so I don't remember exactly what I did, but I believe I simply put the desaturation slider in Photomatix to zero. This was an early experiment and I'm not sure I'd do it the same way now. The conventional advice is to create the HDR image you want in color and then convert to B&W (the usually preferred method of conversion being the channel mixer). I definitely need to do some more experimentation with using HDR in the B&W conversion process. Oh, btw, I think this image may be a little thin for my taste now, so I'd probably add an extra step: creating a new layer set on multiply, and sometimes following this up with a shadow/highlight adjustment.

@leslie: Thank you. See my answer to Gray.

@Amir: Thanks. I originally took this for a theme at JPG Magazine.

@JoeB: I've got the stand alone program and the Photoshop plug-in (though I only have Photoshop elements). I started out exclusively with the stand alone version, but eventually discovered that for images where I didn't have multiple exposures, the plug-in saves a lot of effort because I don't have to manually prepare other exposures. However, the plug-in doesn't seem to provide the exact same results; in fact, in some cases (particularly images with strong vertical or horizontal lines), the plug-in preview looks great, but the actual output has large areas of distorted exposure and I have to use the stand alone program to get a proper result.

By the way, this guy does a lot of great B&W, apparently using HDR.

@Daroru: The crop here is not as dramatic as you might guess seeing the vertical shot. I actually shot this one horizontally, and if I remember correctly, cropped some of the edges.