How to scan old black and white photographs?

I have several old black and white photos from the 1920's that I want to scan digitally for use in a slide show. Several photographs are pasted on album pages and I dare not remove the photos from the pages as the paper is very fragile. Should I scan the whole album page with about 6 photos or should I use my Nikon SLR and shoot them like I was using a stat camera?

Scan them on a flatbed scanner and use any photo editing program to crop them individually, then save each one as a separate file.

If you scan the whole page at a very high resolution, you'll still have plenty of size left for a slide show. It may not be enough to split them up into 6 decent prints, but it certainly will do for a screen.

If you think your SLR is up to the job, you could try it. You'll need to rig up an inverted tripod of some sort.

Otherwise, if you attempt to scan it, you could risk ruining the album seams/spine.

Depending on the size of your scanner and the size of your album page, you may obviously need to scan each page two or even four times to get each picture (example: 12 x 12 album page being scanned on an 8.5 x 11 scanner). If the album page has a plastic protective layer, you would want to remove that first to reduce glare (unlikely given the 1920's vintage of the album). Luckily, your photographs are black and white, so you won't need to do much in the way of color-correction to make the resulting scans really pop. Be sure to maximize the quality of the scan by scanning in either 600dpi or 1200dpi.

In terms of using your camera as the "scanner", much would depend on the quality of the camera and glass you have. If you have a full frame Nikon DSLR with good lenses, you may be able to get a high-quality digital image of each picture. You will want to make sure, however, that you have good natural ambient daylight for lighting when you take the pictures, stay away from indoor incandescent/fluorescent lighting, use a tripod to ensure a sharp picture, and keep the ISO settings on your DSLR as low as possible (100-200).

My guess is that you would get a much better resulting quality through a high-quality flatbed scanner. If you don't have one, you might consider sending your photos to a slide scanning service.