In this picture, Kelly was looking to capture a sense of the catering venue as well as the buffet salad. Extraneous environmental details would have been removed in Photoshop before its use.

“Large lens apertures (e.g., f 1.8 - f4) give you shallow depth of field (focus) and I like that effect for many of my pictures. In fact, my favorite lens is a standard, fixed focal length 50mm lens that I open up to f 1.8.

“If I do use a zoom lens I zoom in all the way and get back the maximum distance because that also reduces the depth of field, letting part of the image go out of focus.

“I like to get down low, right at the level of the plate. Then, I slowly move the camera up until I get the shot and angle I am looking for. Usually, if you're up high you don't do the food any favors. If you have a tripod with a cranking center post, that makes it easy to move the camera up and down smoothly.

“I always try to avoid too much brown in the food — it's the hardest to make attractive. Also avoid limp food — firm, colorful items tend to show up better. If you can get a little bright red or orange into a shot, it helps the image from appearing too flat.

“Props can really help a picture, but you can overdo them very easily. You need to control how much they dominate the image, you can't let them become the center of attention. It usually helps to keep them somewhat out of focus.

“Chefs have great imaginations and I often ask our chefs to help me gus up a shot, both in styling the food and for their ideas in terms of props.

“It helps to know how an image will be used when you're composing it. If that's not possible, shoot pictures different ways so you have more options later.

“You need a good designer and a graphic design to get the most impact out of your photography — the sushi picture is a good example of this. It had a lot of impact to start with, but the poster design makes it much stronger.

“The sushi was shot in the office I mentioned, with a white plate on a white tablecloth. It was backlit by one of the windows and the front is lit by diffused light from the window behind me. A chef worked with me, rolling the ginger. I added the chopsticks in the last few versions of this shot, with the chef adjusting them in different ways. They really helped to make it pop.

“When you have to take shots on location you often have constraints you can't control — that was the situation with the picture of one of our catered events by a beach venue here. This picture was as much about the venue as the food. We wanted to show the background because it was for a catering brochure.

“The picture far from perfect: we only had a few minutes to shoot it and the food couldn't be moved at the time. The flower, which is distracting, was permanently wired to the table menu holder. People were walking back and forth in the background constantly. Depth of field was again controlled to achieve the effect we wanted.”

“Had we finally used this image, we would have removed the trash barrel and pedestrian from the background in Photoshop.”

Next month, FM will take a look at some of the techniques used by Sodexo's David Martin…