You see what a special camera can do for you? All those years of practice had nothing at all to do with it!
Nothing really special about the D800, Rob, just more pixels. It has controls so similar to the controls on my D3 that I didn't really need to read the manual, though I did, having come from an Air Force background where you always had to RTFI to avoid an untimely end. It was pure chance that I had the D800 on that day. I'd been doing some landscape and I went down town still carrying the D800. Usually, when I'm down there, I'm still shooting with my D3 or E-P1 with Summilux.
Yep, there is something about black and white that still has a superior look about it when well done; almost as nice here as if done on my favourite, glazed, WSG 2D!
I also think that that sort of 'luscious' feel is never really accomplished using colour. Why? Not sure, but I think it could be that the colours fight one another for visual supremacy, resulting in a diminishing of the whole, just like some posters manage to achieve on some other threads.
Depends on the subject. Where graphics and geometry are paramount you can’t beat monochrome, but I’d be very disappointed had Albert Bierstadt painted his nineteenth-century views of the Rocky mountains in monochrome.
HCB’s comments on the subject agree, at least in part, with what you’re saying. Not the “luscious” part, though. What he points out is that in photography, unlike in painting, it’s difficult and sometimes impossible to control the relationships between colors. The immutable rules of color don’t go away in photography: complementary colors next to each other increase their vibrancy; analogous colors blend and tend to create serenity; colors, such as red and orange seem to advance toward you, colors such as greens and blues seem to recede, etc., etc. Fortunately, with digital photography and Photoshop we have infinitely more control over these things than we had with film.