Made with Blender 2.34. The modeling is not very good. I might improve them one day. They are from an scene I made a while back. I haven’t posted anything in a long time. This was done to get a render out of my system, jsut like the first time I rendered this scene.
I used radiosity at rendertime and one area lamp with 8 samples for the shadows. I also set the lamp to no specular, with umbra, dither and noise all set to on.
Here is the old image.
The reflections and specular on the apples and silverware (spelling?) are much too high; I think I see toffy apple. 
The fruit in the first render seems to look more realistic I think.
Anyway, the lighting is nice and the models aren’t too bad. 
Thanks for the reply Wiggie.
I agree with you. I need to calibrate my monitor. I saw what you mentioned on another monitor. The apples are approching a wax finish or candy apple finish. The values can be adjusted.
I tried to manipulate the procedurals in the older image to my advantage. I streched a clouds texture on the and exaggerated the specular reflection vase and pot. In a previous version of Blender I came up with an fruit textures I liked, but I haven’t used the latest procedurals in Blender 2.34.
To be honest, I actually prefer the first render. It doesn’t just look like some fruit and silver containers sitting in a cube. It’s got a more interesting mood to it and the materials on both are much more realistic in the old one.
Thanks for the reply jts01.
Honesty apprciated. Maybe I should model a simple table. What do you think? I should recreate the “mood” by duplicating the lighting setup in the old scene.
Again lowering the reflections would be good. Also a blurred reflection would be better on the fruit. The lighting is also hurting the textures. Maybe I could enable specularity on the area light.
I think the bottom render looks the best. the apples and oranges have good textures and look pretty realistic to me… the pear looks like it could use a bump map or something. but yeah it looks way more realistic to me than the top render does.
What might look cool is duplicating the light fromt he old one, but add something behind the camera to make an interesting reflection on the surface. Like a simple (since it won’t be ONscreen) person shape in the doorway shaped light that’s reflecting on it in the old one. A tabletop might be pretty cool. I really did like the lighting better in the first one, had more of a romantic feel to it. If that makes sense.
Yea I agree with the people above me. The old one looks better in my opinion. Great lighting and good textures on the old one.
I see the old image is well liked. It was done with the scanline renderer.
The lighting in that image used 3 spots lamps. 1 key, 1 backlight and one shadow only. There is also 1 negative lamp with a sphere setting (daker areas near bowl). I used techniques from this tutorial.
Update
I like the materials better now, but I still liked the lighting a little darker. It added some mystery to it and left something for you to guess about. Know what I mean?
Yea, I agree. The textures are sweet but the lighting needs some work. great job.
Thanks jts01 & Ic3Cold.
In the previous version, I added negative lamps to force a darker shadow area. But I’m not sure the light source (see reflections) would allow shadowing that dark in the new version.
I do have an area light with a yellow tint in the scene, but it is primarily lit with the face of the cube with the hight emit setting.
I stuggle with getting radiosity at render time to give me good shadows unless using the ‘classic’ radiosity solution.
Anyone have tips on radiosity at render time?