Previously seen as work only for flatbed scanners, today's digital cameras are perfect for making high quality copies of flat art. Photographing the old family photos, historical documents, even your children's artwork is now a breeze with today's digital cameras. Some tips, with the word artwork standing in for whatever flat art or photographs you're making copies of:

Keep the artwork flat. Anywhere your artwork curls up will appear out of focus. You can put small weights (coins, for example) on the corners of your artwork to keep it flat.

Align your camera. To ensure sharpness, make sure your camera is aligned to the artwork. Meaning, the camera should be looking straight on without any left/right or up/down tilt. When correctly aligned, a rectangle-shaped print should appear as a rectangle in the viewfinder without any stretched corners. If the camera isn't lined up perfectly straight on, you will also have focus issues on the edges of the photograph. A tripod is highly recommended for copy work.

Use a small aperture. Most lenses perform best in the middle of their aperture range. Try starting at f8, and make sure that you've got good image quality and sharpness from edge to edge across the frame.

Find even lighting. You need to ensure that your artwork is illuminated evenly without any hot spots. A good rule to remember is that you want your lighting to be somewhat distant from your artwork. The closer the light source is, the less even it will be from edge to edge.

If you don't have off-camera lighting equipment a spot in the shade can be a good, evenly lit spot to do your copy work.

If you have lighting equipment put a light on either side of your art, about five feet away. The more your light is coming it from the side, rather from above, the better. Light coming down can reflect off the surface of the artwork.

Eliminate reflections. Make sure that you're not getting reflections from your artwork, especially if it is glossy surfaced. One way to eliminate these reflections is to take a black piece of poster board and cut a round hole for your lens to project through. This will block out any reflections from your camera, the sky, etc., from showing up in the image.

Shoot at the highest possible quality. You don't want to have to do this again, so make sure that all of your copies are made at the highest megapixel setting your camera is capable of.

Fill the frame. Make sure that the artwork is filling the frame. Don't leave too much dead space around the sides, as you are forfeiting quality and image size when doing so. It's also going to be more work if you have to go in and crop all of your copies.

Sort your artwork by size. Setting up your camera for copy work takes more time than actually making the copies, so you want to photograph all items of the same size at the same time. For example, if you've set your camera up to copy 4x6's, copy all of your 4x6's before you move on to other sized prints.