5 Tips for Food Photography
First tip: Use good models for your photos.
In most cases, the food that shows up in product photography is not edible. This is because they've been touched up by a stylist to make them look appealing in the photo. Raspberries have their fuzz picked of; glasses, bottles, and cans all have some sort of wax or something rubbed on them to give it a chilled look; many food items are slathered in lacquer or some sort of chemical to make it stay and appeal shiny. Knowing this, you can understand that what nature gives us most of the time is not perfect for marketing.
Second tip: Understand the composition for your image.
When photographing, try out whichever angles you believe would make your photographs turn out nice. These can be from naturalistic angles to anything more abstract like a top-down angle.
Third tip: Understand lighting, especially shadows.
In most cases, food photography is best done in a high-key lighting fashion. Unless you know the look you're going for falls in the high-contrast realm, it's good to understand that harsh shadows make the image look unnatural The best model of lighting to replicate (or just use yourself if you can) is natural daylight, where shadows are not too far of from your highlights.
Fourth tip: Understand colors.
Color is a very important aspect to keep in mind when photographing and editing when deciding the look of your images. In many cases, it's appealing to make your food very saturated (but not blown out), but it can also serve a good look if the colors of your food are much more subdued and pastel. Color is especially important as an influence on atmosphere. And color as a compositional element also should be taken into account, as balance or focus.
Fifth tip: Your photos can be about more than just your food.
Your photo can easily include more than just the food, like people, or books, or menus, or whatever that might convey an atmosphere and/or a story. A coffee cup would look unnatural on a cold, oppressing metal table, unless you plan to convey something with that dissonance.
Here are three images I took of some fruits.
