Which do you prefer?

The monochrome image is obviously the edited version, with contrast and brightness adjustments but the other is the natural image with no adjustments made. The high contrast between the light and shadows made it a good choice to convert to black and white.

Birmingham Canal in October

I have upgraded my compact camera to a DSLR and am still getting to grips with it (Nikon D3000) but one of the main reasons I wanted one was for the shallow depth of field effect which I love and can't seem to create on my old camera. The black and white photo simply had the contrast and brightness adjusted on windows viewer, no photoshop experiments just yet!