Grit and Grime

I've been going through last week's shots and I found this unprocessed photo taken in Brick Lane. You can see that the sky is completely overexposed, there is a lot of lens distortion, but I figured it had some potential.
This is the image as imported from the camera and exported from the RAW image. I made no adjustments.

Grit and grime - raw photo

I then cropped the photo and corrected the lens profile distortions and processed it for black and white. (You can see that the lines on the buildings are not vertical and not straight). The first adjustments were to correct exposure, reduce the highlights (the white sky and the reflected light) and increase the contrast.
The I did a lot of dodging and burning (on the face, the jacket and the bricked areas) and it looked like the following photo. You can see that the face is less shiny and the two halves are more similarly lighted.

Grit and Grime in black and white

It didn't work for me unfortunately. And then I switched it back to colour. And this was the result:

Grit and grime

I like the colour photo a lot. It is a little on the dark side, but that is what Brick Lane feels like. Gritty. A lot of this is personal taste and for some reason I like the dark stuff these days. People.