My favorite time killer these days is to play with my photos on my iphone. A very useful app is Snapseed.
Here is the original photo.... good enough.
If I remember right - this is a "Drama" filter - kind of an HDR thing.
There is a "Black and White" filter as well.
You can add frames, boost contrast, crop... all sorts of things to play with. The learning curve is quite a bit shorter than I expected as well. Have fun with it!