Play around with manual mode on your camera. Its basically trial and error. You can do a lot with your camera, but sometimes just having more mega pixels help. My friends a80 is 4 megapixels and even in auto mode it just takes great pictures.

With backgrounds and layouts try to square things up and shoot in places with lots of angles. Its hard to describe...mainly crawl around and look for shots that seem unique.

Any camera store will have a good tripod. They do help greatly.