There's something irresistable about Black and White images, where the distraction of color is removed and you are visually drawn by little more than shape, form and detail and often times the resulting image has way more impact than the colored version might have.
Here's the SOOC pic....
.... and yes, it needed some considerable editing to make it into anything remotely appealing...
... but I did not want to spend ages cutting out the "dude" and whacking him on a faux backdrop, so I used a bunch of Channel manipulations to get where I wanted and where the background was obliterated and my soldier man could stand in all his glory.
I did toss up whether or not to put the cleaned up BW version on another background but in the end decided that I liked the high contrast stand alone portrait look....
What do you think?