This is not related to hunting or reloading but I would appreciate some input on this. I am more or less the keeper of family history, stories and most of the old family photographs. I am 59 years old and some show my great-grandparents, and a couple great-great-grandparents. Anyway, I would like to reproduce many of these and give them to relatives but at a low expense. How well does it work to merely photograph the old photos with a digital camera, compared to scaning and reproducing them with the proper equipment? Here I am thinking of 4x6 photos, not anything large unless someone has a special request. Also, I have some old negatives which may be 2x3 inches. I am thinking of photographing them with the sky behind them and editing them with my computer to make a negative of a negative, which I think should be a photo. Would I get good clarity, again on a 4x6 photo?

If you have good lighting conditions, and use a decent digital camera that can focus close up, then you can get copies of your paper photos as good as with any scanner.

I am not sure what you can do with the negatives though, apart from using a proper scanner for them.

Most home scanners only do 35mm film anyway.

If you have a lot of scanning to do it would save time to get a Cannon 4400 scanner (the 4400f dose 4 35mm negs at once).
If your in no hurry just photograph them.

For big negs I used to use a light box and digi camera.
But the girlfriend lent out my light box and it never came back.
Now I tape them to an old CRT computer screen and adjust the color and brightness for best result.
Then photograph em.
It works quite well.

Thanks for the info. Guess I better started on that project one of these days. - DON

You can take pictures of the negatives with a macro lens while they are on a light table. You then can invert the colors and crop with photo editing software.

You can also convert old color slides this way. All you have to do is crop them.

A good macro lens and a light table will yield the best results.