Bluebells ... and black and white

Image #1:  Bluebells with natural colour.

There was some lovely light on the bluebells under the liquid amber earlier today that I thought I'd try a few shots and see what I could do with a black and white treatment of these pretty blooms.

I thought I'd use a long lens as my original idea was to get foreground blooms in focus with a smooth blur for the background bluebells.  I tried this, but felt there was too little contrast and the delicate foreground blooms, whilst sharply focussed, just got lost in the background blur.

f5.6 seemed to give me the sharpness of the bloom I was looking for and using the long end of the 70-200mm zoom helped reduce the amount of background focus.  The idea was to create a black and white shot, but does it work?

I'll post three versions of the same image each processed slightly differently.  Perhaps let me know which you prefer?

Image #2:  Bluebells with increased light in the midtones and dark areas

Image #3:  Goes without saying really - bluebells in black and white.