I see quite some gradient reversal around the smoke. The original has it to some degree already, but in your edit it’s way worse.
Yes, unless it is an artistic choice, it looks out of place.
Not sure if you were aware of it, but had you tried any of the things mentioned in the article on the site?
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I think that the pure GIMP plugin mentioned on Pat David’s site gives a very good starting point. Like Glenn I too shot loads of black and white in the olden days and it’s good to see some photo’s from him that do look like black and white photo’s many don’t. People seem to be wrapped up in too much contrast and often a lack of tonal range. This one was done initially with pseudogrey.
An attempt at pastel tones that were then digitally augmented more than a real black and white shot could be.
One done mostly via desaturation. 
Liked it when I did it but haven’t since. This is the sort of thing that might be achieved with hard paper but not the usual sort of subject.
LOL Looking at it again I do like it but I know what I was trying to do.
I often find myself uploading junk to flickr that might even include 2 exposures due to lack of dynamic range. Just in case some one prowls around.
John
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This is actually how PhotoFlow works as well… for example, the output of the “desaturate” tool is still an RGB image with R=G=B, which can be manipulated and “color toned” with curves like @ggbutcher shows in his example.
Indeed. In that, the conversion to gray becomes pretty much an artistic manipulation
I’m now using rawproc 0.6 with the tools to produce a fully color-managed workflow (XRite Photographer Kit: ColorMunki Display, ColorChecker), and the only thing I need to figure is why applying a working profile to a camera profile-assigned image is drastically changing the color saturation. But, that’s for another thread…
Trying pseudogray gives for me:
Pseudogrey » :
Error: eval: unbound variable: NORMAL
(Gimp 2.9.9)