Building a digital photography workstation Part 1

So you've bought a digital camera. What else are you going to need?

I'll skip the obvious list of things like lenses, filters, tripod, etc. Let's take a look at the most important piece of equipment after the camera itself - a kick-ass computer!

If you're serious about digital photography, you should be spending serious money on a first-class digital workstation before even thinking about new lenses, flash guns and all the other paraphernalia that goes with the game. Without some heavy-duty pixel crunching and storage capabilities, you're going to get bogged down pretty quickly.

Today's multi-megapixel cameras spit out staggering quantities of disk-filling, speed-sapping bits. To get the best out of a digital camera, you really do need a muscular computer with a gargantuan storage capacity.

Rather than generalise about the specs of a digital photography workstation, I'll tell you about mine. It's the single most expensive and, to my mind, most important piece of photographic equipment I own and use. It cost me about 3000 Euros (approx. US$4000) to build. It took a month to research, build and configure. It is the king-pin of my business. I can buy or rent new cameras, lenses and lighting equipment and be earning money with them the very next day. But if this workstation was stolen or exploded tomorrow, it would take me at least a month to acquire and configure a new one. And I would have lost all my previous work, an unimaginable scenario.

Mac or PC?

My workstation is a Windows PC. I don't like Macs - just a personal preference thing. Recent Apple models are much better value than they used to be, but there are three important points to bear in mind when making the choice between PC and Mac:

• Macs established an early lead in the pixel-processing field and are adored by "creatives" - but modern PCs with the latest Windows software are more than a match for Apple's products. Don't believe for one minute that Macs are "better" for this kind of work. They're not. They're just different.
• Like-for-like, Mac products, from Apple themselves and most third-parties, are more expensive than the PC/Windows equivalents. If you're happy to pay the premium, then fine. If you'd rather reserve more of your budget for other photographic equipment, go with PC/Windows.
• If you are already familiar with one platform or the other then it makes sense to stick with it. Your learning curve is going to be steep enough as it is without adding the extra burden of un-learning one platform and learning the other.

If you decide to go Mac, then only some of what follows will be relevant - you'll just have to pick through for the pearls of generalised wisdom that follow ;-)

Off-the-shelf or custom-built?

The next decision, then, is whether to buy your PC "off the shelf" or "build your own". I can't recommend strongly enough that you should build your own. If you don't feel competent to wield the screwdriver yourself, you can still research and spec the machine yourself and enlist a friend, relative or custom PC supplier to put it together for you. Many off-the-shelf manufacturers offer what they describe as "media workstations" but during my own research I never found any that came close to offering what I wanted. So for absolute control over the choice of individual components, how they're put together and how durable and flexible that PC will be in use, you need to spec it yourself, right down to the last little fan and cable.

Quiet

In my own case, in addition to wanting a workstation that was fast and capacious, I also wanted it to be WHISPER QUIET. This was very important to me. My previous machine was noisy as hell. When you're not in an office environment (where overall noise levels will tend to exceed the noise from your own computer) and you're engaged in an intensely creative pursuit, the last thing you need is constant background "white noise". It tires you more than you might realise, distracts your concentration and generally diminishes the fun of doing what you're doing. So quietness was high on my list of priorities.

Cool

Outside of some obscure scientific and engineering fields, the three common uses of computers that will soak up all the processing power you can throw at them are video processing, still image processing and gaming. Sure, a fast computer is a great advantage for spreadsheet work and surfing the net is more fun with a snappy workstation. But I'm talking here about running a computer's processor at 100% of its capacity for extended periods of time. Doing so generates heat, lots of it. And heat is what kills computers. So another important criteria is EFFICIENT COOLING.

Something to bear in mind with respect to keeping everything cool is the ambient temperature of your working environment. Where I live, a small city in the Algarve region of Portugal, summertime temperatures can easily reach 40°C. Most reviews of cooling equipment are conducted at more normal room temperatures of 20°C or so. Allowing for the worst case, that means I have to add 20°C on top of whatever temperatures a reviewed item might achieve. I'm sure the thermal mathematics is not that straightforward, but I need to play safe, so that's what I do.

Another point is that you cannot assume that your shiny new Apple Mac or Dell Professional Workstation is going to remain adequately cool when stressed in a high-ambient environment. It just ain't so. Such machines are built down to a price and very much for an "average" usage pattern. Setting a batch RAW-processing program going to munch through 800 images will send the internal temperatures through the roof, whatever the pretty brochure says. Remember - H.K.C. - Heat Kills Computers.

Power

You need processing power - lots of it. But that doesn't mean you should spec the biggest fastest processor that Intel makes. The top-end quad-core processors are ridiculuously expensive (and of questionable value for this application). As you'll see later in this series, you can save a bundle by choosing wisely and spend the saving elsewhere to good effect.

Along with raw processing speed, you'll need a big chunk of RAM - I've gone for 4GB and I'll explain why later in the series.

Storage

Once again, you're going to need lots of this. Disk space is like cupboard space - your use of it will expand to fit the amount available (a modern variation on Parkinson's Law). Most certainly you're going to want multiple hard disks in order to keep things efficient and to keep up with the demand. My own machine contains no less than 8 hard drives, totalling around 2800 Gigabytes (although the use of RAID brings the total storage available down - more on that later).

Reliability and long life

As noted above, this workstation is the single most expensive piece of photographic equipment I use, and the most time-consuming and painful to replace. It also contains every image I've ever taken with a digital camera. If it breaks down my income stops until I fix it or replace it. So it's vitally important that it works and stays working for many years to come. Many component choices and configuration options are determined by this criteria alone.

Watch out for Part 2...