Sometimes, colour is a distraction. Removing it can reveal an image where you can see shape, form, depth, perspective and texture more clearly than any colour image can. So the removal of colour should be seen as an opportunity rather than as a restricting factor. Conversion of a colour image to mono is a fairly straightforward process these days, with a wide variety of tools at our disposal. The interesting thing with monochrome is that it probably lends itself to personal style more than colour. The result of this is that it is more what you do with the tools you use than the tools themselves. The raw image to me is just the starting point and despite passing that image through Photoshop and, say, Silver Efex Pro to produce a mono version, I will still usually process the file further to produce exactly what I want … ie my style. Mono is becoming more and more prevalent in my work to the point where I now look to interpret certain things I see in mono rather than colour.