I was gonna have a go at this, but I believe Cyn has totally nailed this already, and I don’t know what a bobbed whirl is either!

If I was doing this sort of shot in a studio I would choose a background similar to what Cyn has done here anyway. I might be inclined to leave it in colour and do one of each, I still believe that there is no real substitute for B&W film in some respects.

 

As Steve said this isn’t an easy photo to fix, and I agree that scanning a min of 600dpi , 1200 even better, best still scan the negative if you can. The real issue here is that prints don’t scan well compared to negative or slide. (IMO of course)

 

Either way it is always better and easier to work on large files

They wouldn’t have made the cane if you weren’t meant to break the rules