exercise: Black and white

For this exercise I need to plan and take a photograph which will look better in black and white.

I have chosen a building over looking the creek in Faversham, the shape was one of the first things that attracted me. I decided to focus purely on the shape of the building, and composed my shot accordingly, there was nothing I could do about the bushes around the base of the building so I decided I would need to work with them and use them to form a base to the shot.
As it was quite a bright day I used F11 at 125's shutter speed with a daylight white balance and matrix metering.

 Above is the original colour photograph, which is ok but nothing special, with all the colours the shape of the building is lost.

By converting the shot to black and white the shape is more defined, and appears more 3 dimensional.
To convert the photograph to black and white I carried out the following adjustments.

I opened the image in raw and adjusted the exposure slightly to remove the clipped highlights on the windows and door frames I then adjusted the clarity slider and then opened the image in photoshop elements. Once opened I went to image  convert to black and white and used the pre set urban/snapshots as a starting point.  I made further small adjustments to the red, green and blue sliders and the contrast. finally I adjusted the black and white points in levels.
I was surprised how differently I looked at something when I wanted to photograph it as a black and white picture rather than just taking a photography then getting home and thinking that might work in black and white.