Aonghus,
I agree with Michael that you should use a tripod and you should be able to use a tripod. A reasonably versatile tripod and tripod head can position your camera any way that you can. You may need an extension arm if you are shooting straight down and you can’t straddle the subject with your tripod legs.
But if for some reason you can’t use a tripod, Lundberg’s suggestion to use faster film seems like a good approach. That presumes you are using a film camera and not a digital camera. You didn’t say.
If you are using a film camera, then you must be scanning the photoprints or negatives into Photoshop, but you also didn’t mention anything about your scanner. For low contrast images you should scan at higher than 8-bit RGB. Depending on your scanner you could be scanning 30, 32, on up to 48 bits of RGB resolution, all of which will come into Photoshop as 16-bit per channel RGB images. The higher precision images allow higher precision Photoshop adjustments in brightness and contrast, which you need to "tease out" a decent image from a low contrast, underexposed image. After you get a decent adjustment you can "downshift" your image to the 8-bit RGB image mode to apply filters and other tools that aren’t available for 16-bit mode images.
If your images are unavoidably blurred or out of focus you could try the demo of the Focus Magic plugin for Photoshop. I use it and like it because it sharpens the entire image and not just the edges. For more information on Focus Magic and a free download, see:
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http://www.focusmagic.com>
— Burton — (not associated with Focus Magic)
