Black and White Treatment

I've spent some portions of my time shooting limiting myself to black and white for sake of the effects.  One of the images from Getty really worked out well for a bit of levels enhancement and a black and white treatment:

Before

The image is low-contrast and relatively blurry in the original form—manually focusing at 400mm is tough given how thin the depth of field is.  The birds on the posts are generally sharp, and the ones flying aren't.

The levels enhancement helps the contrast some, but it makes the image a little over done.  Fortunately, a black and white treatment really helps:

After

All in all, I think it's quite an improvement—and the print of the black and white version was pretty terrific.  One of my recent favorites, to be sure.

Compositionally it could probably be better (the dark spot in the upper left is a small overhang from a tree a few feet away), but it does handle rule of thirds fairly nicely I suppose.  The blurriness of the image is actually somewhat attractive here, as it helps to distinguish the middle third from the bottom one.  I'm undecided about whether the top third is compositionally useful or not—if not, a crop might serve better to fill things more adequately.