Softer than a Chime

Asparagus foliage in the autumn.

In processing this one, I loved the vibrancy of the yellow and the deep blue of the sky behind it, but it still looked dimensionally flat. It needed something to help it "pop." So I employed a technique known as "boom vignetting" in the digital world--something many high school photography students are probably familiar with (though it's much easier to do digitally). In the darkroom, students like myself in our lunacy creative genius quickly learned that holding quirky-shaped papers above the center of the exposing paper produced a much more dramatic vignetting effect than the traditional corner-burning method. If you finessed the technique, it could even look natural. I can't say I've heard anyone speak about it with very serious tones, but I still wouldn't recommend underestimating the effect.

Using a cartoon-ish "explosion" shape in photoshop (or really any interesting shape/brush), you simply cut the shape out of a layer copy of the base image, use Gaussian Blur on that layer, select layer mode to "multiply," and scale back the opacity as needed. The result is a dramatic vignette effect without the obvious "vignette corner" appearance.