Ashlee,

The Nikon D50 cannot take images in B&W and even if it could, you shouldn't. Shooting in RGB allows you to convert to B&W in your editing program and this allows for much control of how the RGB image is converted. There are a number of ways to do this. I would avoid the conversion to grayscale as such an image would NOT print well with most printers. Another way is to use desaturation, but the best way in my opinion is to use the channel mixer with decolorize setting; this allows you to favor one or more of the R, G and B channels and gives you more flexibility how the B&W image looks and the differences are quite dramatic.

For best results you should shoot in the RAW mode, as this will give you ultimate control over your images and gives you more flexibility AFTER you have taken the shots.

If you haven't yet, I suggest you buy some books about image editing. If you use Photoshop then I recommend Real World Photoshop, which is an excellent book if you really want to get into in-depth image editing.

Frans Waterlander
pixographer

Ditto Frans on the in camera b&w. My Oly C5050 has both a b&w abd sepia modes; both of them produce a rather insipid image.
I use PSE 2.0 and 4.0 that do not have channels, but the conversion is easily done using 2 hue and saturation layers. The sepia effect can be done by going into color variations after the conversion to b&w.
All very simple and straight forward.