If you want to take a technical photo, a photo that is useful for product or tutorial purposes, there are a few very simple techniques that will improve your results.
One: digital cameras need a lot of light.
Photosensors essentially build up an electrical charge when hit by photons. The fewer the photons, the worse the signal/noise ratio. You want the most photons you can arrange, so plain old transistor heat noise is held at a minimum by comparison.
Also, if your camera can be set to overexpose or underexpose shots, and also show you a histogram of pixel values after your shots, then you should use these features together. Expose low enough that brightly-lit white objects aren't getting "clipped" (pixel values mashed to pure white with no detail), but expose as high as possible otherwise. This again improves the signal-to-noise ratio. Then you can adjust to taste in (#5) below.
Two: put your camera on a tripod.
Electronics guys should be aware of how LONG a few milliseconds really is, so "I can hold this thing still for 1/60second" should sound completely silly if you think about it.
Three: the larger the source of light, the softer the shadows.
Not many people have a 2x1 meter photo studio diffuser strobe lamp in their house. However, most people have a nice white ceiling with a matte surface. Bouncing a strobe light or even a halogen desk lamp off a large white ceiling or large white cardboard reflector does wonders for softening the shadows.
Four: make sure it's in focus.
I can't tell you the number of times I've seen people hold a digicam up to a tiny device from about two feet away. On their 2 inch preview screen, it seems sharp enough, but when you LOOK at it, the image is totally out of focus. The camera manual will tell you the closest distance the lens is capable of focusing.
Five: post-processing is essential.
The goal of the exposure-judging circuitry in a camera is to ensure that the AVERAGE PIXEL VALUE is MEDIUM GRAY. That's it. That's all there is to it. There are some specialized definition of "average" on better cameras, but every camera since 1960s with an electronic exposure meter has aimed for that.
If you take a photo of a snowy scene, or like my product shots, a photo of a white background, that will end up looking dingy gray in the end. This is what the camera ASSUMES is the right thing to do, but you know better. You want white things like snow or backgrounds to look like white.
Most photo editing software will let you adjust the "levels" or tone "curves" of the image. You should adjust the curves so that the brightest parts of actually-white objects have the maximum value, and the dimmest parts of actually-black objects have the minimum value. This usually increases your scene contrast, which also boosts the color saturation.