read about that journey here
If you’d like to take your black-and-white to an entirely new level, there’s always infrared. Over the past 20 years I’ve had several cameras converted to infrared (you can read about that journey here). While initially I was intrigued by the “false color” images I could create doing that, lately I’ve shot almost exclusively black-and-white. This gives a different look than traditional B&W, with blue skies going even darker and green foliage recording as white. In fact, shooting black-and-white infrared is what got me interested in making better monochrome images with a “normal” camera. Wanting to shoot B&W at times, I didn’t always want to take an infrared camera on a trip with me, or carry a second body. And that’s what led me to creating the custom Picture Control setting as described above. It doesn’t give me the same look I get with infrared, but comes pretty close.