This is a repost of my guest blog entry for Estela Schnelle, author of the successful daily blog WeeklyBite.    All photos copyright © Weeklybite.com, all rights reserved. Many thanks to Estela for having me on her site as a guest blogger. I apologize for spamming her after it was posted!

If you want to grow your food blog fan club, it is essential for your images to look as tasty as the recipes themselves sound. Estela has combined mouth-watering recipes, excellent cooking instructions, and appealing images to create a blog that people want to visit again and again, and that is the ultimate goal. Return visitors = solid fan base.

So what basic techniques should you employ in your food photography. Easy, just use KISS. Here are 5 basic rules to Keep It Simple Savory.

Rule #1 Keep it simple.

The images are about the food itself and not about the items on the kitchen counter, your kitchen cabinets, or the hands holding the cooking utensils. Unless you’re a hand model, keep your hands or fingers out of the picture. To do this, get in close and crop tightly. By filling the frame with the ingredient(s) or final dish you’ll eliminate all the distractions.

Rule #2 Keep your lens wide open.

Even modestly priced digital point and shoot cameras allow the photographer some creative control. I’m talking about one setting in particular, the aperture priority setting, seen as “Av” or “A” on your camera’s main control dial. Set it to “Av”, open the lens as wide as possible – f/2.8 or f/4.0 or if your camera allows it, as wide as f/1.4 . The lower the number, the wider the aperture (the baffles inside the lens) opens up. This will give you images with a narrow focal point accompanied by pleasing bokeh for the rest of the image. Bokeh is a fancy Japanese word for the blurry or out-of-focus part of the picture. Set your camera to it’s widest setting f/1.4 or f/2.8 and experiment until you get a pleasing image that suits your taste or suits the food you are trying to photograph. The camera will automatically dial in the remaining settings for you. If you don’t have “Av” or “A” setting, try using the portrait setting which is usually indicated by an icon of a person’s side profile view.

You can’t help but look at the froth on this milkshake. The background material complements the color of the milkshake but doesn’t distract from the focal point since it is pleasingly out-of-focus. The straws lead your eyes down to the drink. Don’t you just want to drink it up right out of the picture?

Rule #3 Keep the food in natural light.

Unless it’s absolutely necessary, complete power outage with no moon visible, or you’re a professional food stylist and photographer, turn off that pop-up flash! Estela is a master at this. Not once, while I was watching her photograph the food and ingredients, did she use the pop-up flash.

Estela has a window that casts a soothing fill light from behind and slightly to the side of her food prep area which helps accentuate the texture of the ingredient she is using. Overhead light, although slightly warmer than the daylight streaming in, just adds color to her images.

The light sweeping from the back left adds shape and texture to these eggs.

Natural lighting allows you to see and almost feel the texture of each of these ingredients.

Rule #4 Keep it off center and use shapes to enhance visual interest.

Split the camera viewfinder into thirds horizontally and vertically and place the focal point of the image in one of the four corners where the lines intersect.

The diagonal placement of the bars below adds visual interest.

Rule #5 Keep it colorful- nothing says yummy more than color.

Who doesn’t look at a bright red strawberry, a fresh green apple, or a colorful leafy salad and immediately think healthy and tasty?

Add color if there is none. Estela has a collection of small fabric remnants that she uses under the bowls, plates, and ingredients to add color to an otherwise dull-colored dish or set of ingredients.

This applesauce is naturally monochromatic. Here she adds visual interest with a flowery fabric swatch beneath which adds a classic appeal to an otherwise bland-colored photo.

That’s it! Five simple ingredients to enhance your food imagery. You don’t need a fancy-shmancy camera to put these rules into effect. Follow even one or two of these and you’ll see marked improvement in your food photography and you can apply them to anything else you may want to photograph.