Here is a shot of a homeless person watching the construction of new condos in downtown San Diego -- the contrast is both 1) the treatment of the person being in color and the rest of the image B&W -- but more to the point, the real contrast is 2) the fact that this person has no hope of ever inhabiting the condos which will likely cost better than $700 for even the smallest floor plan.
This was shot on an old Oly C-700 Ultra zoom (when it was still "state of the art")
Here is another one from that same camera but it's been re-hashed a few times as I did not want to scour all my hard drives to find the original
The only camera I ever had that I went for high contrast on was that old C-700, because though it was decent for the day, it often made sense to just kill an image on purpose to see what you would get. That is how the first image happened. The sunset with the wheel one was however a shot I really cared about.
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It's not what you spend, it's what you buy!