documenting old family photos

I absolutely love flipping through our family albums from the early-1980s. The photos are beautiful and simple and vintage-y, like my parents weren't trying so hard to get the perfect shot. They're just pictures of our real life (and life on vacation in Hawaii, as pictured). My mom brought a few albums for me to borrow after Owen was born. I really hadn't planned on doing anything with them other than comparing my baby pictures with Owen's, but I've been so inspired by them that I'm working on a little project to document our early years.

These aren't my photos to keep (they're my mom's), so if I want copies I have to do something with them that doesn't sacrifice the originals. My first thought was to scan them, but that's a huge pain for me. I don't know if it's that I lack patience or that my scanner is annoying, but either way, I wanted to come up with another solution. I'm not trying to document every single photo. I'm picking my favorites and that's it.

Using a simple background and natural light, I'm taking photos of the originals from overhead. My goal is to go through the albums, photograph my favorite pics from the archives, and make a photobook which I can share with my cousins, sisters, etc. I'll let you know when I've made some progress. But for now I can tell you that I love how these new-photos-of-old-photos are coming along, and it's way easier for me than scanning, cropping and printing.

Do you have any family archive projects in the works? Any old photos lying around that need to be documented? How do you plan to deal with them?