I fell in love with the Color Splash assignment as soon as I saw it. My original plan was to use a photo of The Green Monster that I had taken when I toured Fenway Park in Boston last summer but I struggled with it and decided to focus some photos I had taken on my Spring Break trip to Manhattan last year.

To do my assignment, I opened up Photoshop CS (yes, people still use it even though it is nearly 10 years old) and imported my photos. I then created a new layer which was a copy of my photo and changed the saturation on that layer to 0%. This made my top layer grayscale. I then took my eraser tool, made it small, about 9 pixels in diameter and carefully erased around the inside edge of what I wanted in color. Once I was satisfied, I finished erasing the inside edge of my top layer so that the only part of my photos in color were one object in each photo.

When I originally took this photo, I did not plan on having the taxi in the shot. I was trying to get a photograph of the model, standing in the middle of Times Square freezing in the early March weather. I’m glad that I did not delete the shot since I love how I was able to use it for this assignment and make the iconic yellow taxi the focus of the photograph.

I have never actually skated on the ice at Rockefeller Center but loved the juxtaposition of the fancy ice rink in the middle of the city and the bright red Zamboni cleaning the ice.

I took the same shot and wanted to emphasize the iconic statue of Prometheus guarding over the ice rink. The gold color of the statue contrasts well with the grayscale color of the rest of the photo.

I’m happy with how my photos turned out. Once I figured out how to do them, I had so much fun that I decided to do the two extra photos.