Black and White Photography

I had long skype session with my Papa today, kept him awake till almost 3 AM India time. Amongst things we discussed were photography and how strangely a lot of people I know from my school batch are fascinated with it and do a real good job of it as well. I shared with him a link to some of the images uploaded by Reihem [Link Here] on his photo blog. Papa mentioned how a lot of photographers lean on black and white to capture a certain artisic depth of an image. So far I haven't switched over to black and white mode on my camera, but after seeing some of the great work on Roy's photo blog, I got the itch. I started by processing some of the shots I had taken in color, desaturating them while maintaining the luminosity and playing around with the contrast.
These two shots are examples of this.

I was very satisfied with the results. Though the second one was a bit out of focus, I call it arty farty soft on the eyes. 

So I kicked camera into black and white mode, and looked around my room for objects of affection, a flask, my cleats (right boot) and an empty bottle.