[Doug Pardee]

Originally Posted by milosh

did anyone of you ever do (or consider doing) only black & white photography (while you were starting out of course) in order to learn better?

Not to learn better, but because color film and processing was a ton more expensive back then.

I am thinking that if someone shoots only in B&W, that will force him to pay more attention to these other elements of composition. And later you can come back to shooting colour.

Composition for B&W and for color tend to be different. Certainly there are many things that you can learn from shooting B&W, but maybe half of those things are specific to B&W. Once you introduce color, a bunch of the rules change. Areas are generally defined by color rather than by tone, and blown highlights and blocked shadows are usually considered to be undesirable in color.

You might want to pick up Michael Freeman's book "The Photographer's Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos" (not to be confused with the classic book "The Photographer's Eye" by John Szarkowski). This is not a "how to" book; it's a discussion of the various compositional aspects and how they play into our visual perception.

This would of course require one to shoot B&W in camera.

The problem is that in-camera B&W tends to be poorly implemented. B&W is fundamentally about tonal differences, and the camera processor tends to have a heavy-handed and uncontrollable tone curve. Many cameras can shoot Raw+B&W JPEG, and that gives you a B&W preview along with a Raw file that you can convert to B&W to get the tonal effects that you want. (I use LightZone for the latter, although it's terribly slow).