Distances

When you say “portrait lens” to a photographer, usually they’re talking about so-called ‘longer’ lenses. That is, lenses whose focal length is generally in the 85-130mm range (on 35mm cameras at least).  You’ll read about how longer lenses flatten perspective and are generally more flattering to the subject.  On the other end of the spectrum they’ll say that wide angle lenses are not to be used for portraiture because they distort or at least exaggerate people’s features.  Making big noses bigger and that kind of thing.

The thing is, most of this is either misleading or wrong.  It’s really all a matter of distances, not focal length which causes these effects. Focal length comes into play because it effects your field of view, that’s the amount of the scene left to right you capture with it, usually represented by an angle.

So for our discussion, let’s imagine that your 5 feet from a friend of yours. To really visualize it,  go get a friend and a decent range wide to telephoto zoom lens and try it.  Being 5 feet away from them, your perspective of them is about as normal as can be.  They’re 3 dimensional without looking distorted. If you had a 50mm lens on your camera and took a picture, you’d get pretty much what you’re seeing right now. That’s why they call 50mm lenses ‘normal’. It would probably be a pretty boring waist to head portrait.

Now if you wanted a photo of just their head and shoulders you have two options, either you can zoom your camera up to 85mm or so, or you can ‘zoom with your feet’ and get closer with the 50mm focal length.  If you did both of these you’d see that they look different from each other. But that’s not because of the focal length, but rather because you got closer with the 50mm to get the same framing. In fact, if you took your original waist up shot from the last paragraph and cropped it to the same framing as the zoomed in 85mm shot you’d see that they’re identical.  

So if you want take a head and shoulders shot zoomed out to 28mm or so, you’ll notice that you have to get REALLY close to the subject to fill the frame. It’s this closeness that causes the distortion of close-up wide-angle portraits.  You can even see this without a camera; Just cover one eye and get a few inches from your friend’s face, it’ll look distorted, just like the 28mm lens.

Ok Bill, so what’s your point?  Well it’s just that any lens can be a portrait lens where the person looks normal and not distorted. It really just depends on how much of their surroundings that you want to include in the picture. Go back to 5 feet away from your friend, look through your camera and zoom in and out and see how the framing changes.  Maybe the wood paneling behind and that flower pot next to them are really interesting elements in the composition. If so, maybe shooting wide-angle works, or maybe it’s all distracting and so you zoom in and shoot something tighter.  Maybe somewhere in between.  The point is that it’s not about one focal length being ‘better’ for portraits. They all can be, it’s really up to you.

Personally I love more environmental wide-angle portraits.  I like seeing and working with the space the subject is in.  I think it makes portraits more interesting. You can tell this by looking at my work as well as my lens compliment. 28mm, 35mm, 50mm primes.   I recently bought an 85mm traditional ‘portrait’ lens and when I take pictures with it I feel like it’s speaking a different language than me.  It obviously got potential as it’s painfully sharp, and all the way open at f/1.2 the depth of field is awesomely narrow.  It’s just going to take a little getting used to, but working outside your comfort zone is always a good exercise.  So if you like long lenses, go walk around with something wide this weekend, or the other way around. Either way you’ll probably come up with something different than your norm.

Japan – the camera dilema.

Ok, so I’m leaving for Japan in a couple weeks and have been thinking about the camera question.  I need a break from shooting tons of digital stuff, and I’ve been told by my friend Jonathan who lives over there that I can get film, so I’ve decided to bring a film camera.  Just one film camera.  Which begs the question, ‘Which film camera?’

I’ve got two options in mind, Hasselblad medium format or Leica M 35mm format.  Both are excellent cameras, surprisingly similar in weight (actually the Leica might be a little heavier). and with a bag on the leica, they’re about the same size.

I’m leaning towards the Hasselblad and shooting mostly chromes, as that’s what’s brought me the most pleasure in the past, but thought I’d get the opinions of others that have been there and done that.  Remember that I’m not shooting for sale or anything, these are just for me and I don’t mind coming back with 150 pictures total.  Maybe a roll a day or so for 2 weeks

Medium format is easier to scan, but 35mm would have more images per roll and is a little ‘faster’ to use.  Ah, decisions, decisions.

If anyone has any advice or insight, please enlighten me.  Thanks.

Low Light Considerations

A reader wrote me an email a couple days ago asking me to write about low-light photography, so here it goes.

I shoot in low light almost all of the time.  In fact, it came as a revelation a couple years ago when I realized how much freaking light you need to take good pictures most of the time.  Figure you’ve got 400 speed film and want to stop down to f/5.6 or so to get some depth of field, and then you’re hand holding the camera and shooting people, so your shutter speed needs to be 1/60th or a second or better. That’s of course, in the old days when super grainy fast film was your only other option.  Now on digital, many of the new cameras do really well at 3200 or 6400 iso or even higher.  An order of magnitude better than just a few generations ago.  This opens up lots of opportunities where in the past you would have just put your camera away.

Ok, enough nostalgia. First off, a few facts. All things being equal, the bigger the sensor, the better, because if you’ve got a cropped sensor and a full frame one which are both 12MP, each pixel on the full frame sensor will be bigger and thus capture more light with less need to amplify the signal and all the noise that comes with that process (man, long run on sentence).  This really only applies to 35mm cameras right now.  Medium format backs use larger sensors, but as of now, they’re using CCD sensors which are terrible in low light.  This is the same technology that Nikon used up until the D3 and why their cameras sucked at high-iso before.

Fact number two, depth of field is related to the size of the sensor or film.  So a lens at f/2.8 on a cropped sensor is going to have more stuff in focus than the same aperture on a bigger sensor. This is why the depth of field on large format cameras is so crazy narrow even at f/5.6 or f/8 and why they needed to stop them down to f/64.  Talk about needing a lot of light!

So, now how to use this information?  Say you’re at a bar with your camera for a karaoke birthday party and for the sake of the story you’ve got a fast prime lens on your camera.  Well you’ve got 3 things that will effect your exposure.  Aperture (how big the hole is), shutter speed (how long the hole is open), and iso (how sensitive the sensor is).  Since we’re in really low light, there’s no chance you’ll be shooting at 1/1000th of a second.  So let’s figure you lock down your shutter speed to 1/50th of a second.  So that leaves aperture and iso, and these are two somewhat conflicting controls.  Sure you can keep the noise down by keeping iso at 1600 by opening up your lens to f/1.8 for example. But if you’re trying to get a bunch of faces in focus, you’re going to be in trouble.  So you stop down to f/2.8 or so (still not great for depth, but what are you gonna do) and up your camera to 3200 or 6400 and deal with more noise.

Unfortunately the effect of aperture on depth-of-field and shutter speed on blurred images are part of the physics of the universe, so there’s not much you can do about them.  So camera makers coming out with better and better sensors and noise reduction is the only way to improve the situation. There’s a brick wall there too though, since a pixel needs a certain amount of light to work and light is in packets called photons, there is a point at which a pixel needs at least 1 photon to register anything at all, but I don’t think we’re near that yet.

Another annoying thing is that while a cropped camera’s smaller sensor gives you more depth of field, allowing you to use larger apertures, it’s also inherently more noisy due to the smaller pixel pitch.  No free lunch. Or use a flash, though flashes kinda suck in situations like that.  I know a wedding photographer who swears by one of those little Sony camcorder lights.  He sometimes uses it mounted on the hot shoe, but also uses it to backlight or hairlight a subject in a pinch.

Personally, I vote for a full-frame dSLR and some fast primes which would give you the most options in such a situation.   I hope I answered the question. 

Intel i7 Photoshop/Lightroom Workstation – Part Two

Sorry for the lack of posts the past few days.  I, along with my lovely assistant HA, spent them doing computer stuff and getting my new i7 machine built. I thought I’d share a couple of photos and some observations of the process for those that are interested.

I’m still installing everything and testing and whatnot, but at first glance, this thing is FAST. I’ve overclocked the processor from it’s nominal speed of 2.66GHz up to 3.6GHz. So basically it’s faster than the $1000 high-end processor at stock speeds. I could go higher, in fact it seemed stable at 3.8 and even 4.0, but I decided I’d rather back off and give it some room to breathe. I ran prime95 for a while on it and with all 8 cores (4 real cores, each split in 2 by hyper-threading) the temperatures max out a little below 80 degrees.  That’s hot, but absolute worst case scenario and there were no crashes or blue screens or anything like that.  And this is with 12GB of ram installed.  Had to reseat the heatsink and reapply thermal paste a couple of times to get the right amount and the right placement, as this is still a black art, people come up with completely contradictory advise on the online forums at anandtech.com and others.

With the case all closed up, the fan on the power supply really speeds up to try to deal with the heat buildup. It’s a small case and I’m installing 2 more fans when they come tomorrow. One 92mm to push air into the front and over the hard drives, and another 120mm in the back to expel the air by the cpu cooler.  Also, I think I can lower the CPU voltage a bit and still keep it stable.  I’ll play with that this week.

I’ve got three hard drives in there right now. A little WD Velociraptor as a boot drive and a couple of Seagate 1.5TB drives in a raid 1 array for storage. All of them are mounted in elastic bands as you can see in the photo.  The Antec Solo case I used comes with the bands stock, the only one I know of. It’s a silent pc dorky person trick to keep the drive vibrations from amplifying through the case.

Last night and today I moved my images from my old arrays to the new one by mounting one drive of each of the old arrays in my eSATA dock.  Very handy and relatively quick (still took hours, it is a TRILLION bytes afterall.  That’s 1,000,000,000,000 bytes).  I had a bit of a scare when one of the drives died while transferring.  Just locked up and won’t do much but click now. Luckily I had the other drive from the raid pair, and was able to get everything off of that one. Both were the 1TB seagate drives which have a firmware issue.  Looking up there serial numbers on the Seagate site showed that they both have the problem.  I had no idea, very scary timebomb.  This is to say, “Go back up your images, right now!”

So now it’s time to use it for a while and see how it drives.  By the way, anyone who was thinking of building their own machine based on my previous posts and just got scared reading this, I was overclocking and doing fancy things to squeeze performance out of the system. A stock system would have none of that craziness and would still be very fast. More to come.
 

Intel i7 Photoshop/Lightroom Workstation – Part One

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been eyeing parts to build a new computer for myself.  Not that my Q6600 based machine has anything wrong with it, but when you’re staring at Photoshop all the time and waiting for your computer to save 500MB PSD files, every little bit counts.  Plus technology makes me happy and building new computers is fun.  And for some reason lately, I haven’t been having enough fun.  So on Monday I broke down and clicked ‘submit’ on my order at Newegg.com


Here’s the plan in list form. Some of the parts of the new machine are going to scrounged from stuff I’ve already got, and a few parts are going to swapped from my current box.  Those parts that I’ve already got are in italics:

—————————–

Intel i7 920 processor
This is the low-end i7, but it’s supposed to beat the pants off of anything else out there.  Especially overclocked which I intend to do.  I’m aiming for 3.6 or 3.8GHz.

Asus P6T WS Professional Motherboard
I probably could have gone with just the P6T deluxe, but I like the look of the board and I figure that the workstation bios revisions might be a little more stable.

OCZ 6GB DDR3 Platinum kit (x2 = 12GB)
I’m going to fill all 6 slots with this stuff for a total of 12GB of RAM. I think that should do me ok <evil grin>. I chose this memory based on reviews on newegg and it’s lower cost than the alternatives. Hothardware.com had an i7 RAM round-up today and this stuff won, so I think I chose wisely.

WD Velociraptor 150GB boot drive
I’m stealing this from my current machine. Was going to get an Intel SSD, but the competition in this space is going to heat up in the next few weeks, so I figured I’d watch and see where it shakes out.  Plus there was an article claiming that these things slow down over time. Intel refutes their claims, but it gave me a moments pause.  Plus, this thing is damn fast anyway.

Seagate 1.5TB storage drives (x2) in RAID 1 array
I’ve currently got 4 1TB drives in 2 RAID 1 arrays. I have a little under 1TB of photos currently on my machine, and I wanted to simplify my setup for heat and complexity reasons.  I was waiting for the 2TB WD drives, but they’re expensive and I’ve already got one of the 1.5 for backup so I bought another and will gang the two up and transfer everything over.  Then use the old 1TB drives for backup with my eSATA dock using the 2 eSATA ports on the motherboard.

ATI Radeon 3850 Video Card
Not the fastest card out there, but certainly no slouch.  More than enough to run CS4 OpenGL stuff fine.  I can’t remember the manufacturer on it though.  Oh and it’s fanless, so it makes no noise.

Antec Solo case
Small, with rubber bands to mount the hard drives in.  This little case is great.  I had replaced it to get a much bigger Lian-Li case that can handle 7 hard drives, but I like the small one better.

Seasonic 480W power supply
I like Seasonic power.  Quiet, stable.  I’ve never had trouble with them and I’ve used them in the last few builds I’ve done in the past 4 years or so.

Thermalright Ultra120 Extreme 1366 heatsink
The stock Intel cooler is fine for normal speeds, but I plan to overclock this puppy.  I’ve got a similar cooler in my current box and they still rate really well, and should be much quieter than the Vigor Monsoon I recommended last time.

————-

I’ve got a nice Samsung SATA DVD-RW drive that I will probably install, though I’m going to try something fun and install Windows from a USB drive.  Or rather from an 8GB SanDisk Extreme 3 card in an Ultra-DMA adapter.  I’ve already transfered it over and booted from it, seems to work.  I found the instructions on google.

Oh and speaking of that, I’m going to try a little experiment and not install Vista x64, but rather trying using Server 2008 as a workstation. I saw an article about it a while ago and figured I’d give it a shot. My favorite OSs were NT4.0 and Win 2000 so this goes back to those bare-bone days.  Basically, it’s the same kernel and underpinnings as Vista, but with less services and crap on top.  Responsiveness and even benchmarks show it to be faster than Vista.  Maybe it’ll be a waste of time, but it sounds kind of fun.  I don’t use this desktop for anything but Firefox, PhotoShop and Lightroom anyway.

I’m going to build it out and stress test this weekend.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  Oh and as for price, keeping in mind that I had a few of the parts already, I spent less than $1000.

Men and Women

To many of you, what I’m about to say may sound maddeningly obvious, but I’m going to say it anyway. People are different.  And by that I mean, in this particular instance, that light or a lighting setup you loved on Mary may never work on Sarah, and vice-versa.  Sometimes it takes a lot of finagling to get light to ‘work’ on a person.  Sure there is the one nice, big, soft slightly off camera light, but that gets boring after a while.  I’ve been staring at the photos in that Karsh book trying to decipher some of the setups like they’re hieroglyphics. It’s not been an easy exercise and I’m not sure if it’s because:
a) I suck
b) his lighting setups are hard and complex
c) for some reason his looks are easier with hard lights than strobes
d) I need more lights (he often used 6 or more) and modifiers
or e) all of the above.  
The jury’s still out, but I’m leaning toward A or E.

But I’ve come to a few conclusions in the few years I’ve been doing portraits. First off, men and women are very different.  Men can look rugged and a bit haggard and it’s a good thing. Women, not so much.  So if you look at the photo of me from yesterday for example, the key light up front to my right was down blow me with a grid on it, shooting up.  You can pull off up-lighting a man.  In fact, go look at the cover of Details magazine or GQ and often the men on the cover have lights coming from below.  Notice the odd shadows. See, they’re there, but somehow they don’t bother you because they’re on a man’s face.  Stick Anne Hathaway in place of Robert Downey Jr and you’ll be in for a shock.  Plus I’ve pulled out most of the red channel in that b/w conversion.  This makes my skin look terrible, but it gives the photo some much needed grit. Sometimes I feel like digital makes skin really blown out and monotone easily, not sure why.

As I’ve said before, sometimes I’m surprised that some people I think are attractive are very hard to shoot and others that I don’t think are end up being loved by the camera.  It’s strange that.  There are some people, like my friend Mary that you’ve seen many pictures of, who are very hard to make look bad.  She’s just gorgeous.  You could light her with a fluorescent flashlight aiming up from her jeans pocket and have it look good. I’m not sure exactly what it is, maybe cheekbones, maybe her eyes? Whatever the reason, people like her are fun for photographers because they let us experiment and play with lighting setups we’d never try on the job when the clock is ticking.  And you never know what can come of some  good old fashion play.  The more tools in your toolbox the better.

I know I’m going to get yelled at for this one, but as a general rule of thumb, the more photogenic the person, the harder the light you can use and pull it off.  Bare bulbs and reflectors and grids versus softboxes and diffusers. There are exceptions to this rule of course; blowing out imperfections with a beauty dish or ring light for example.  But it’s not a terrible rule to keep in mind.

Personally, I’m getting to the point in my photography where I can make decent light almost anywhere.  So now my goal is to figure out ways to construct the light I want just about anywhere. Like going from being a really good hunter/gatherer to being a farmer.  My very own light agricultural revolution of light.  More reflectors maybe or bringing my AcuteB more places (need to spend more time with this on location and outside).  Look for more of this in the coming weeks.

Window Light

I’ve been addicted to window light the past couple days (see yesterday’s images).  I think it’s funny the lengths we go to just to recreate artificially something that most of us have ready access to.  And for some reason, the fake stuff never ‘quite’ looks like the real thing to me.  Sometimes I try to trick my mind into thinking it’s one or the other to see if it’s all in my head.  Kind of like listening to broadband static and trying to trick yourself into thinking it’s a waterfall you’re listening to (by the way, it works the other way around too, next time you’re near a waterfall, close your eyes and try to imagine it’s just static on your stereo. Fun stuff).  

Anyway, I need to do more of this.  I’d love to have a natural light studio with skylights like all the guys in Paris from the turn of the last century.  Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ studio is crazy cool too.  Sigh.  A guy can dream, can’t he?

I’ve got more to say on this subject, but I’ve got to mull it over a bit.  In the meantime, here’s a shot from a portrait commission I shot today. A bit cheesy I’ll admit, but the light is nice.
Oh, and for those into such things, I’ve started messing around with twitter, so add me:  follow billwadman

Ratios

Photography is full of ratios, from light sources to focal length and subject distance.  However in this case I’m referring to image ratio.  That is, the ratio of the height of the frame to the width of the frame. This used to be largely dependent on your camera choice and still is in many ways, but now with digital, all kinds of things are available to us.  That little Panasonic LX3 for example, can go to 4:3 or 3:2 or even 16:9 just be flipping a switch.

But let’s back up a bit and look at the past. Large format cameras came in all kinds of sizes from 2″x3″ to 20″x24″, though it was 8×10″ and 4×5″ that are the ones largely available today (for the time being).  Around the turn of the century, Kodak released it’s brownie camera with it’s 120mm roll of film which was the granddaddy of the medium format work.  Medium format film is shot in all kinds of ratios.  The old Hasselblad and Rollei put out square or 6×6 images.  Other manufacturers like Mamiya and Fuji started shooting rectangular images at 6×4.5 (645) and 6×7 (67) and even larger ones like 6×9 and 6×12, though those are somewhat niche.  And finally (for our purposes) was the Kodak 135 format, otherwise known at 35mm film which was taken from the motion picture world.  Though a few other cameras did so earlier, it was the original Leica which set the 3×2 ratio we observe today.

Great history lesson Bill, but what’s your point? Well, just that images taken at different ratios feel different and I wonder why that is.  Lately I’ve taken to cropping my images to 4×5 when I’m experimenting for myself.  Now, you could go and talk about golden ratio and all that, but none of the formats are right on that one.  4×5 is probably the closest, though I haven’t done the math.  It’s funny how you see differently depending on how the frame is shaped.  I take pictures with my Hasselblad that I wouldn’t with a 35mm camera.  In fact, one of the reasons I bought the 35/1.4 for my Canon was so I could crop square and get the same image as I’d get through a normal lens on the Hasselblad.

Let’s use a photo of Charlie Maxwell as an example.  Now this isn’t ideal, because I’ve already taken the shot and I didn’t intend to crop, though BusinessWeek did.  Anyway as you can see, there’s a different look to each, even though they’re the same image.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about all this is how it relates to printing.  Here in the US, we have all kinds of sizes of paper that were invented before the dawn of time, all with no relation to each other.  8.5×11″, 8.5×14″, 11×17″, 13×19″.  Basically a nightmare because none of these relate exactly to the image ratios above.  Which means that if you want to print your images with full bleed (that is, full-page all the way to the edges, with no margin) then you will end up having to crop.  11×17″ and 13×19″ are close to a 3×2 35mm frame, but no cigar.  I generally print my images smaller than and in the center of the paper, but I’ve never been a big full bleed guy.  And the use of your images in most magazines requires the same cropping, so make sure you leave some space around the edges of your pictures.

In Europe and everywhere else in the world, they use paper sizes decided upon by an ISO standard in the ratio of 1 to the square root of 2.  A much more ideal system, or at least it makes sense and sounds kind of bad ass, though it still leaves photographers wanting as you’ve still got to crop.

This is all to say that lately I’ve liked shooting 4:5 ratio on my digital camera via cropping.  I think the high-end Nikon even have a heads-up display which will give you crop lines in your viewfinder to make it easier to shoot with cropping in mind.  There are some purists who will insist that cropping is sloppy.  And while I’ll agree with them that cropping to save an otherwise crappy shot is not always cool, I think it is OK if you’re shooting with a different ratio in mind, but are stuck with the 2:3 that your camera gives.  Sometimes 2:3 is too tall for me, and I’m certainly not going to apologize for it. Plus with today’s 21MP images, we’ve got to spend the extra pixels on something!

Branding Artists?

Seems like everything is branded now-a-days. You know, consistent logo and color schemes and type treatment so that people recognize you.  Sure, there’s the obvious stuff like Pepsi and Pillsbury, but the same goes for hospitals and schools and even most countries. And look, I’ve was an art director for almost 10 years before I started in photography, so I’m certainly not ignorant to this fact, but I wonder how far it extends?  By the way, I love my friend Ze Frank’s take on all this. 

I’m gearing up for a big marketing push for myself.  Breaking down doors and barriers and pushing up to the next level and other metaphors for taking the next step (damn, you really can’t NOT use a metaphor), and one thing’s been nagging me.  Do I need a Bill Wadman brand?  You know, a logo and a color scheme and a consistent type treatment?  Since there are 8 million people in NYC, at least 3 million of them are photographers trying to make it big, would a really great logo make me stand out in the crowd?

My friend Meg Wachter has a logo and she’s doing very well, but there’s no way to tell if the logo is having an effect. Her work is really good, so that’s what explains it. Unless Meg had an identical twin sister who took exactly similar photos and didn’t use a logo.  Then we could compare their careers and see, but alas, no twin sister, or at least none that I know of. <cue dramatic ‘bum bum BUM’>

When I look at the big photographers online, they’ve all got their name in some type treatment, but who knows if that’s consistent or if that’s just what their designer used this time around. Plus they don’t really need to brand, they’ve got people calling them because of their work. Which takes me to my next issue.  I want to be respected based on my photography and not on my branding or how I look or how much hype surrounds me (not that much at the moment).  I want to know that it’s my work that garners the respect.  I always loved that in Fountainhead, all it said outside his office, in only simple type, ‘Howard Roark, Architect’. Did Picasso have a logo? Then again, did Picasso have a facebook page?

And don’t forget, there are those 3 million other photographers who probably want the same thing and you need to stand out.  So hey, maybe use the proverbial pink resume paper if you think it’ll pull you out from the crowd.  Get as much boat speed as you can, when you can, while you can.

I’ve been working on some ideas myself, and I’ve got a couple design ringers thinking about it as well.  We’ll see what we come up with.  But in the mean time, I wouldn’t mind hearing what other people think on the subject.  Also, remember, I don’t do personal portraiture or events, so I don’t need the branding for a store front or magazine ads for myself, it’s more about presentation of myself to art buyers and industry people. Also, no comments on the hot pictures of Mary on the stairs?  Really people?  😉

My i7 Dream Machine

<Nerd alert> If you’re really not interested in dorky computer stuff, you can ignore this post </Nerd alert>

I’ve been looking to upgrade my Core 2 Quad machine for a while now.  It’s fast, but like anyone I’d like faster.

Below are the parts that I’ve currently got on my wishlist at NewEgg.com.  But I’d like to note that I’m assuming a few things with this:

1) That you’ve already got a monitor, keyboard, mouse, tablet, speakers, etc.  This is just for the big computer part that goes on the floor.

2) That you know what you’re doing building a computer.  It’s really not that hard if you’re up for new experiences.  Actually it’s quite fun and there is something to working on a machine that you know you built.

3) I’m going to salvage my video card and hard drives from my current machine.  I also have a copy of Vista x64 that I don’t need to buy.

So, here are the specs:
$79.99      Antec Solo Black/Silver Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case     
$314.99    ASUS P6T WS PRO LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard     
$294.99    Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor
$358.00    12GB RAM = 2x CORSAIR XMS3 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600
$369.00    Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH080G1 80GB SATA Internal Solid state disk (SSD)     
$66.99    Vigor Monsoon III LT Dual 120mm Fan CPU Cooler Socket 1366 Ready     

According to Newegg, this comes to $1,483.96

As I said, I’ve already got hard drives (a 150GB Velociraptor and 4 1TB storage drives), power supply, and a video card.  But you could certainly get multiple TB of storage for the cost of that SSD.  Or get 6GB of RAM instead of 12 and spend the difference on a decent video card.  I prefer passively cooled ones without fans, but that’s because I’m a silent computer dork.  You don’t need THAT fancy of a video card even for photoshop CS4.  Anything around $100-$130 will do quite nicely.  

If you really wanted to slim it down you could get a nice 1TB drive (like the WD Black series) for $130 or so, stick with 6GB of RAM, a low-end video card and the stock cooler for about $1000.  You could also save about $100 by going with the low-end P6T motherboard, but I’m willing to pay a little more to get the higher-end workstation board which may be a little more stable.  Me, I was planning on overclocking this 2.66GHz CPU to around 3.6 or so.

Reasons why I’m hesitating pulling the trigger:

1) The economy is really bad, so it’s hard to justify spending money when the computer I have works just fine. Then again, my current machine could be sold for around $500 at least, so that would defray the cost a bit.

2) The prices of DDR3 RAM are coming down, so every couple weeks I wait, I could get more/better/faster RAM for less. Maybe even wait until I can get the 4GB DIMMS which would let me get to 24GB of RAM.  I know, silly.

3) I’d love to replace my 4 1TB storage drives with just a pair of the new WD 2TB drives that have just been announced but everyone is currently sold out of. They are rumored to be quiet and cool and surprisingly fast due to high areal density.

4) Anandtech.com is going to post a round-up of the latest SSD drives and I’d like to see if any of them can compete with the Intel for less before I leap. Up until now, almost all of the reasonable ones were haunted by a crappy JMicron controller which had horribly bad write latency.

The crazy thing is that even with the SDD and the 2TB drives, I can have my dream system for less than $2000.  That’s just insane.
If you’ve got questions, I’ve got answers.