What quality do you want? Do you want to use an existing VHS player or would you be open to buying a new one?
If you still have the 8mm you could skip the VHS altogether and go directly to digital ... it will look a lot better; especially if you have a good digital camera. If you don't, you could probably rent one (go for a 3cc like the
Canon XL2, it also does native 24p which is what you really want for film transfer. You could even go HD; but it would be more expensive).
You'll need a telecine projector to playback and capture the film.
Here's a link to ebay:
http://search.ebay.com/search/search...ine&category0=
You could probably rent one of those too along with the camera. You do photography (nudge nudge wink wink) so you probably already know of a good store in your area to find out.
And the wikipedia article on telecine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine
It's not all that expensive ...