If you have just a handful of photographs to scan you can ignore this reply... because I'm going to completely disagree with scanning MANY images especially if you have a nice digital camera and a tripod. By 'nice' I mean something in the
8 megapixel and above range. The reason I say 8 megapixels comes from the idea of eventually making prints. If you can fill the frame of your camera with the photo you should end up with a file that will look nice printed at an 8x10 or 8x12 size... 8 inches x 300 ppi = 2400 pixels and 8 megapixels is close to 3400x2400 pixels. For tiny images scanning may be the best option unless you have macro functionality in your camera/lens. I wouldn't recommend using a 5 megapixel camera for anything larger than 5x7 prints but that's just me.
Using a tripod is simply the best way to go about using a camera for shooting prints. You want to be able to either point the camera straight down or at least at a downward angle to a surface that can be parallel with the camera's lens. Here's a rough ascii art kind of visualization:
Code:
\ Camera pointed down
\ |
surface to hold prints _\_ /|\ tripod
As for the angled surface, you can use books, cardboard, whatever you have available as long as it doesn't move as you swap pictures. If it moves then you end up having to reframe the image in the camera and/or readjust the focus if you're using manual focus. I've found autofocus to work fine for me though. If it's possible, hooking the camera's video output up to a TV can help too - you have a larger screen to check your framing with that way.
Forget using the camera's built-in flash (unless you know you can set it up to completely avoid glare) and just use plenty of light. It doesn't matter too much if it's incandescent household lighting, daylight balanced fluorescents or sunlight because I think most cameras handle those white balance conditions fairly well. Avoid yellow/greenish fluorescent lighting at all costs though. If you can get the white balance right you won't have to correct it later on in Photoshop.
If your camera has the settings, you want high shutter speeds and low ISO settings to avoid any potential blur or noise. If you don't have the settings, use as much light as you can.
If you spend any time scanning images, you know that no matter how clean you keep your scanner bed you're going to end up with dust in your scans at some point and that dust just makes for more time you'll spend cleaning it up in Photoshop or whatever later on. You almost never see dust if you shoot the photos with a camera.
If your prints have a rough texture to them, the scanner can sometimes pick up that texture way more than we want and it becomes a pain to remove that texture later on. Using a camera, that texture can be nearly invisible given good lighting, which generally would be 2 lights, one to the left and one to the right of the image. If your prints don't have a rough texture to them you can get away with using one light though.
You probably don't have any 11x20 inch curved prints (kind of egg shaped) but yeah, scanning those is pretty close to impossible. I'm guessing at the size those things were but once I saw some of those I broke down and bought a DSLR for myself.
Then there's the issue of time. Scan one image and save it however you like. How long did that take? 30 seconds? 2 minutes? Multiply the time it took to do that one image times 100. See where I'm going with this? There might be more setup time involved when it comes to shooting vs scanning, but once you get going you should be able to quickly make up the difference.
Assuming most of the images are about the same size, you won't have to fiddle with the zoom on the camera or the position of the tripod between images. Even if they are all different sizes you simply organize them by size... shoot all the 3x5s, then 4x6, 5x7, and so on.
If you have 100 pictures, once you get into a rhythm you could be spending less than 10 seconds per image to acquire the digital file which would be about 17 minutes spent shooting. At 30 seconds per scan and 100 images you're looking at 50 minutes + the time you take to clean off the scanner's glass between scans. I've actually had a project or two with over 1000 photos to be "scanned" and there's no way I want to go back to using a scanner when it comes to large quantities of photos. The amount of time it takes to copy files from the camera's card to the hard drive in your computer is trivial IMO.
Decent scanners are cheaper than a nice digital camera, but you can't take pictures on your vacation with a scanner... maybe it sounds silly but I think it's a valid argument when it comes to how I want to spend my money. A camera is more versatile than a scanner.
This is just one person's opinion on how to deal with mass amounts of photos to be digitized. I've done this using a 5 megapixel Sony point-n-shoot camera as well as with a 10 megapixel Digital SLR and people have always been happy with my results. Looking at what was done with the photos that were shot in this thread I think you can see it's possible to get great results with a camera even when the pictures the camera took weren't perfect to begin with.
One last thought... in the olden days before decent scanners were so darned affordable... you'd take your photos to a photo lab to be copied. They copied them by shooting them with a film camera and then printing from the new negative.