Summer salad – photo remake

I finally found time to go shopping for the ingredients for Matt’s summer salad. I wanted to take part in Lara Ferroni challenge, and make and photograph non-salad based salad. Of course, I had to improvise, and my recipe doesn’t contain mint nor yellow tomatoes. But I was able to find edible green leaves not being salad :) (namely parsley) and we bought some yellow bell pepper to have enough colors.
I build the salad from watermelon, yellow bell pepper, tomato, grapes, cucumber and feta-type cheese. Put it out on the glass garden table and used early afternoon sun to backlight the subject. I added a couple of peppers, matching the colors on the salad and a bunch of parsley to fill the space, as I couldn’t find any interesting looking napkin in my father-in-law’s house. I added some interest to the background.
The one thing which intrigued me in the challenge was Lara Ferroni comment about difficulty to take a horizontal photo. It never bothered me, but I also don’t think I was using the background of my set enough. But I noticed something browsing through my salad images.
It seems that with the higher camera position, my photo looked more interesting. And the reason for it was, that instead of including whaever was far behind my set, I had more space taken by the plate with the salad.
I played a bit with the aperture for the shot, and as much as I liked the shallow depth of field of f/4.8, it seemed like not enough of salad ingredients were in sharp focus. I was between f/6.3 and f/9 (I took images with random increments), and finally went with f/6.3.
I did only basic post processing on it, like clarity and vibrance, I adjusted tines as the image seemed very bright, there is so much white there, and added a bit of sharpening.