I have a bunch of old photographs that I would like to have reproduced

If I take them to a professional to have this done, which method produces the best quality .. scanning or photographing?

 

depends on the surface finish (glossy, matt, textured, etc.) of the photos. I take it you are wanting to digitize the images. A professional digitizing service would likely produce the best results. There are many digitizing service companies; Kodak has a selection of digitizing packages available depending on the number of items to be digitized.

 

most of the photos are old black & white photos and I am hoping to get some hard copies reproduced as well as digitized that I can use for a publication. I am guessing there are 35--40 photos in this old packet.

 

I have no experience with Kodak but you might give them a try. Looks like this would qualify for the smallest package which includes 2-packets of 25 photos. Once you have the digitals back you can get hard copies at many locations.
Shop Now – Kodak Digitizing
seems right now they are offering a 50% discount...

 

Thank you very much .. I appreciate your help.

 

I don't have experience using digitizing services for photo, but I did try several with 8mm film. The quality difference between different services was huge, ranging from terrible to very good. I can't speak to Kodak's service as I didn't try them, but in general, the bigger volume outfits had poorer quality results. I now find out what equipment and process a company uses before even trying them. It's possible there is a local company that does media digitizing. The city near where I live is not very big (population hundreds of thousands) and there is a good local place that does this. A person there took me back and showed me all their various equipment for each of the different types of media they handle. Their service was very personal, open and helpful. Good sanners are cheap, and lots of regular people just scan their own photos and slides with great results. What the local place had was a very nice setup for digitizing photos or documents using a high quality digital SLR camera, which can give much better results than scanning in cases where controlling the lighting of the object is important. An example would be a heavily silvered old black and white photo, where scanners straight on lighting will reflect off the silvered areas, obscuring the underlying image.