Revisiting an image

A friend who looks at this blog from time to time commented on this image that I posted last month:

and wondered if it would work well in monochrome, especially a high-contrast black and white image.

This version, immediately below, is what emerges from an 'auto' conversion of the image above into b/w:

And what follow below are various other ways of extracting a monochrome image. In each case below I went back to the unedited original colour image (before it was processed into the photo at the top of this post) and used that original to convert to monochrome.