With food blogs popping up like mushrooms after a rain and digital cameras both affordable and high-quality, some of us are casting envious eyes on the photographs in cookbooks and food magazines and asking ourselves, "How do they DO that? How do they make the food look so good?"

It's an axiom in the food photography business that if a food photo doesn't make the viewer hungry, it's not doing its job.

But before the photo can do its job, a lot of other people have to do theirs - recipe testers, writers, project directors, creative directors, graphic designers, food stylists, prep cooks. Oh, and the photographer. And miscellaneous equipment.

Equipment? Says O'ahu photographer Romeo Collado, "We bring TWO kitchen sinks." That includes not only cameras and lenses but lights and light stands, tripods, great loops of power cords, light meters, generator-size power packs that deliver short-duration high-voltage energy to the lights, sandbags to steady the tripods, heavy-duty clips for securing this to that, white foam core and other forms of reflectors that bounce light onto the subject, a TV monitor onto which to project the pictures, and a rolling carts to hold it all. And there are backups for everything: "We're like the fire department. We bring the whole truck whether we're rescuing a kitten or putting out a three alarm."

The 24 or so full-page photographs in The Advertiser's sequel cookbook, "The Island Plate II," due in stores Nov. 15, were the combined work of eight people - with a little help from their friends. A single shot took us a minimum of an hour, and that doesn't include the time spent debating which dishes to photograph and what props to use, tracking down inexpensive props (thank you, Salvation Army), shopping for and preparing the food, fussing with details and scouting locations.

From a food photographer's perspective, that photo-per-hour pace was light speed.

"I like to do maybe a maximum of four or five shots a day," says Collado, who, with friend and fellow photographer Brian Suda has been behind the lens for all three cookbooks I have written ("The Island Plate" in 2005 and "Island Style Entertaining" in 2007). "At that rate, we have time for the little nitpicky things. We can make sure the sets, the background is right. We can pull all the elements together."

But to accommodate deadline and budget constraints, our team took over Honolulu's Sub Zero-Wolfe demonstration kitchen for just three days, and managed as many as seven to nine shots a day. And that doesn't include a bunch of quickie "accent shots" - tight photographs of individual foods, which would be manipulated on the computer to appear as though they were drawings. Or the celebratory group portrait we made right after Collado clicked the shutter for the last time.

At the end of three days, we were footsore, frazzled and not a little giddy. And some of us still had cleanup and breakdown to accomplish. Collado would spend the next few days editing - culling out the not-quite-perfect shots before e-mailing the digital files to publisher Island Heritage.

Still, after three harrowing shoots, I still think it's one of the most fascinating, satisfying and exciting things I've ever done in my professional life - even though all my partner, Marylene Chun, and I were allowed to do was prep the food.

Stylists Nina Pfaffenbach (for "Island Plate") and Iwalani Bush (for "Entertaining" and "Island Plate II") took over after that, bouncing around the room, one minute helping Collado and Suda envision each shoot, the next using tweezers to fuss over an out-of-place grain of rice or tucking a wedge of carrot under a lettuce lumpia to make it sit up properly. Each had a trick for every dish, though all were photographed in edible condition and no fake foods or substitutes were used - except for some faux ice cubes.

The average home shooter doesn't need this elaborate a set-up in order to make a beautiful portrait of a family favorite dish, or to snap a quick souvenir of a much-anticipated restaurant meal.

But a few tools do help: a camera with a zoom lens that tends to the macro (close-up) side and a good flash, a lightweight tripod and - most important of all, says Collado - vision and experience.

"It has nothing to do with the camera and more to do with the person's ability to see the shot in his head before it ever happens. As we say in the industry, 'Use the camera in your head before you use the camera in your hand,' " he says.

You can see it in Collado, Suda and Bush as they stared thoughtfully at an empty dish against a suggested background, formed crop marks with their hands, mumbled to each other, stepped up and stepped back, cocked their heads and shot practice shots with a stand-in (something approximately the size and color of the object to be photographed, which stands in before the delicate food is placed on the set, particularly useful with foods that don't keep, such as a souffle or the David Eyre's pancake we photographed).

"It's almost like making a portrait of a person. You look at the qualities and features of that particular subject. You do whatever it takes through lighting and composition, through foreground and background, to bring out those features. The color of the beans, the texture of the shrimp. You zero in on the thing that makes your mouth water," says Collado.

Collado, who intended to be a schoolteacher until he took a part-time job with veteran studio photographer Errol de Silva at Cameras Hawaii in 1989, met Suda and Bush when all three were working for the now-defunct Liberty House, shooting advertising images. Bush also did window displays.

He says digital photography has changed the business drastically, and for the better. You can see what you've shot right away, and, with the aid of a TV monitor, often at the very size that it will be used. Photographers used to have to check their shots with a Polaroid camera, and the colors weren't always true. You can shoot as many frames as you like without worrying about the cost of film; the images are just blips on a memory card. And you can do more tinkering in the computer, to enhance light or color or correct mistakes.

With food, timing is often tricky. There's a term in the profession: "the hero." The hero is the "beauty piece," the focus of the photograph, the piece that's just the right size, shape and color. And there's a saying: "Heroes don't last" — they dry out, they wilt, they tilt, they change color, they sag.

"That's why we use stand-ins. When the food stylist says we're ready, we gotta go, bing, bang, bong, and the thing is dead already," says Collado.

A truly professional shoot is a collaborative project requiring lots of give and take and leaving the ego at the door. The cooks have to remember that "what cooks good may not look good," Collado says. Vegetables are left raw or half done so their colors are intact, roast meats are painted with Kitchen Bouquet, vegetables are slathered with shining glycerine, flowers are sprayed with water to create a dewy look, wine glasses hold colored water.

The stylist and photographer have to understand how the food appears in real life (think a bowl of plain, brown stew) then figure out how to make it look better. Prop the potatoes and carrots up with crumpled foil so they emerge from the gravy. Light a mosquito punk to imitate steam wafting from the bowl. Tuck a crackly-topped golden roll alongside the stew and place some crumbs artfully about as though the bread had just been broken.

And we do mean "place": Bush would fuss for minutes with a single sliver of bell pepper. "We'll shoot it and we'll be happy with it, and then we'll look at it for a few more seconds and Iwa will say, 'That onion is drooping.' So we shoot it again."

But sometimes, you don't get the shot.

Pfaffenbach tells an amusing story about a trouble-plagued shoot on a beach. After a long, long day, they were at the last photograph. "We got it," the photographer said, meaning they finally had the positioning and lights right, though he hadn't made the picture yet. "We got it!" Pfaffenbach shouted in delirious misunderstanding, kicking sand all over the set. Oooops.

Which brings us to the No. 1 rule of food photography. DON'T eat the subject matter, until the shoot is finally over.