Playing With My Photos

Recently I have been attempting to turn color images into well-done black and white images.  I am working on how to accomplish this task.  Black and white images need to have a wide range of tones and it's important that the image does not turn out "muddy" looking, which usually means too many mid-range tones.  I seem to have a problem using black to the degree that I should, but I am working on this.  I think this elephant image turned out nicely and included all the correct tones.