Photographing paintings

I received the following inquiry via email:

I use two kinds of images in my articles on O-Nerd and on my art site: photographs and professional scans. I take the former with my digital camera, usually outside when there is plenty of sunlight. I then edit the JPEG with GIMP to get the edges straight and crop. These are of decent quality for anything not too big. The latter I have done at Que Imaging, which results in very high quality TIF images. These are expensive, though, so I usually wait to scan multiple paintings together and then edit them with GIMP as well.