Driving Through A Winter Wonderland

We had ourselves a bit of a blizzard Wednesday night.  Blowing snow, high winds, low visibility and the general type of conditions that have the local weatherperson telling people to stay home.  Ofcourse, that meant it was time for me to hit the road.  I was looking for an excuse to get out and take some photos of the storm, and luckily My Lovely Assistant was at work which gave the the opportunity to gallantly go pick her up and offer a ride home.  Aren't I sweet.  The first photo you see here was taken through my windshield as I was driving to pick her up.  Don't worry Mom, as you can see, the light was red so I wasn't actually driving when I took this shot.  It was taken at f/2.8, 1/200sec, ISO 3200 at 43mm.  I had to use a wide aperture and a high ISO to compensate for the low light.  I think it worked out pretty well as you can see the effect that the blowing snow had on visibility.  For the rest of these photos, I'm going to try something new.  My friend Pierre had also been out taking photographs and decided to publish them in black & white.  I found it to be an interesting look, so I decided to try going that route with my storm photos as well.  Let's see how they turned out.

f/2.8, 1/30sec, ISO 1600 at 68mm

f/4, 1/50sec, ISO 1000 at 24mm

f/2.8, 1/25sec, ISO 400 at 24mm

There you have it.  The regular photograph and it's black and white double.  I have kind of mixed feelings.  I like the black and white in the second photograph of the three, but I prefer the colour versions of the first and third.  I also got a little bit lucky in catching a snowplow passing by just as I was taking that third photograph.  It kind of adds a little something.  In the first photograph, I think that the blowing snow gets lost in the image when the colour is discarded.  I was able to use lower ISO's for the second and third photographs thanks to the big street/parking lot lights.  Usually, I would have used a tripod and longer exposure times for such low-light shots, but that wasn't an option with the high winds that were swirling around.  So there you go.  What do you think?  Black and white or colour?  Feel free to let me know.