Dwain, I love your willingness to experiment. The first set is nicer. The composition is very nice in all the pictures. You have a great eye for photography. To me it just looks like you could use some time in Photoshop and learning about the final presentation of photos. I won't claim to know much at all about photoshop. I still can't seem to get the turning color into great black and white's down. That process still escapes my abilities however, I will freely disperse what I do know.
It looks like you used a paint dabble (or however you spell it) on the first one in the second set. The problem I see with it is that you loose to much detail. The pictures seems to just become a blob and you can't see the story anymore.
That is just my opinion.