My preference for low contrast B&W

[mporter012]

Would love some feedback on a couple photos I edited this week. I'm increasingly editing my black and white images in a low contrast manner, preferring the mid-zones, like 3-8ish. If you look at old black and white photos (before Ansel Adams), it was far less common to have as much contrast as is popular today. Michael Kenna is one of my fav. photographers and his stuff is contrasty, but in my own work I've gravitated towards low contrast. There are probably several ways to accomplish this, but I tend to slide down ''structure'' or "clarity" and will lift the the tone curve some to bring the blacks up to somewhere around zone 3. I started in the darkroom and pretty much use Lightroom in a really primitive manner (as much like the real darkroom as possible!!), and this is how I've accomplished the look I preferred in the darkroom using a lower contrast paper. Curious your thoughts/feedback/suggestions on my methodology.

Thanks!

 

[jtk]

Hard to say with online images ...however lower contrast works better with bigger prints...those 3 would work better for viewers on 20x24 than on 11x14 and would need to be printed very differently if smaller. Big prints can be immersive. If tiny (8x10) they make the viewer think you consider them precious objects...do you?