>>3453029If your friend is an artist, I’m sure they have some photographer friends who already have the gear and knowhow to use it—you’d probably be better off throwing them a few bucks to take the pictures. But if you want to go the route of doing it yourself:
1. A camera with a decent-sized sensor. Bigger than a point & shoot, ideally. Bigger than a cellphone, definitely. Those always look like ass viewed up close. But something like an older DSLR will be fine. Canon Rebel XS, Nikon D60, Pentax K10, etc. Just about anything will work for you.
2. A lens. Preferably a decent one, but really one that’s not *utter* trash will be fine here. So like an 18-55 kit lens for an old cheap DSLR will be fine. Something like a 50mm would be better (and Yongnuo makes a cheap one in several mounts). If you want to do more than just art repro, the 18-55 will be more overall versatile, but a 50mm will reproduce art better.
3. A tripod. You can cheap out on this, probably, since your needs aren’t too taxing. If you want to try getting into photography for real, though, you might want to invest in a good one.
Now, set the camera to aperture-priority mode, somewhere around f/8, ISO 100 (or whatever the camera’s lowest ISO value is), on the tripod, with the art as close to parallel as you can get relative to your camera’s focal plane.
For lighting, just try to make sure it’s as even as you can get. Window light is fine, or even just your room lighting (although that might give you a color cast that it’ll be tricky to deal with without getting into raw editing). Make sure it’s positioned so that there’s not a glare anywhere from the camera’s perspective.
For bonus points, put the camera in self-timer mode so it has a bit of time to stabilize between when you hit the shutter and when it actually takes the picture.
Let me know if any of that went over your head or you need any more help.
