OK, now, I don't use Photoshop that often, but when I do it's always on computers no better than Luckless' current computer, and I use comparable programs a lot either for photo or video editing. Sure, it's not always fast, but I've never said "Gee, this is so slow that I need to more than double the amount of ram I have now." Images get large uncompressed, but rarely so much so that they exhaust the amount of ram I have, even with several layers.

Provided that I'm just editing photos I've taken and not, you know, making them from scratch, I've never seen Photoshop require more than maybe two gigabytes of ram. Layer blending and stuff takes processing power, yes, but isn't that mostly done on the GPU (and can't most of it be done in or nearly in real-time with shaders)?

This is not to say that Photoshop is fast on an older machine, but I've just never gotten the impression that I needed more than 6 GB of RAM or a reasonable Core 2 Duo.

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"Last weekend I was out doing what I would like to consider 'light' action shooting at my local paintball field, and produced 860 RAW photos from only a handful of games."

You're doing it wrong. You shouldn't have to take so many shots. In a typical 1.5 hour model shoot, I might take 30 shots total. A week long trip to Portland, OR saw me take only 200 shots, and most of those were at an air-and-space museum with quite a few pieces. Work on getting the shot right in the camera and you won't have to spend so much time in post weeding through images and tweaking them to make them look good.

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"Last weekend I was out doing what I would like to consider 'light' action shooting at my local paintball field, and produced 860 RAW photos from only a handful of games."

You're doing it wrong. You shouldn't have to take so many shots. In a typical 1.5 hour model shoot, I might take 30 shots total. A week long trip to Portland, OR saw me take only 200 shots, and most of those were at an air-and-space museum with quite a few pieces. Work on getting the shot right in the camera and you won't have to spend so much time in post weeding through images and tweaking them to make them look good.

He'd be doing it wrong in a studio model shoot. Trying to shoot a live paintball game during the action is very different; his number seems quite reasonable to me. You don't get to ask each player to pose, then shoot your gun in 3, 2, 1...

[quote name='capn_midnight' timestamp='1307461830' post='4820558']
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"Last weekend I was out doing what I would like to consider 'light' action shooting at my local paintball field, and produced 860 RAW photos from only a handful of games."

You're doing it wrong. You shouldn't have to take so many shots. In a typical 1.5 hour model shoot, I might take 30 shots total. A week long trip to Portland, OR saw me take only 200 shots, and most of those were at an air-and-space museum with quite a few pieces. Work on getting the shot right in the camera and you won't have to spend so much time in post weeding through images and tweaking them to make them look good.

He'd be doing it wrong in a studio model shoot. Trying to shoot a live paintball game during the action is very different; his number seems quite reasonable to me. You don't get to ask each player to pose, then shoot your gun in 3, 2, 1...
[/quote]


I've shot sports and racing before, too, it still doesn't warrant so many shots, especially if he's indicating "heavy" is more.

Firstly, shoot RAW, why because you will regret not shooting it at some point :-) I only shoot RAW, sure it takes up more space but space is cheap.

But back to your computer...

I do a lot of photography...

My rig is:
Core I7 920
12gb RAM
3 tb storage
2x 24 monitors

Win7 64bit and lightroom 3.

this is about 1.5 years old now, and still is going strong.

Plus I borrowed a Spyder and colour calibrated the monitors as well.

I've got a similar setup. Core i7 920, 9 GB of ram, 1 tb storage (with a backup server - very important!) and a pair of 23" monitors. It chews through RAW files plenty quick.

[quote name='BeanDog' timestamp='1307465468' post='4820576']
[quote name='capn_midnight' timestamp='1307461830' post='4820558']
[color="#1c2837"]
"Last weekend I was out doing what I would like to consider 'light' action shooting at my local paintball field, and produced 860 RAW photos from only a handful of games."

You're doing it wrong. You shouldn't have to take so many shots. In a typical 1.5 hour model shoot, I might take 30 shots total. A week long trip to Portland, OR saw me take only 200 shots, and most of those were at an air-and-space museum with quite a few pieces. Work on getting the shot right in the camera and you won't have to spend so much time in post weeding through images and tweaking them to make them look good.

He'd be doing it wrong in a studio model shoot. Trying to shoot a live paintball game during the action is very different; his number seems quite reasonable to me. You don't get to ask each player to pose, then shoot your gun in 3, 2, 1...
[/quote]


I've shot sports and racing before, too, it still doesn't warrant so many shots, especially if he's indicating "heavy" is more.


[/quote]

I'm willing to bet you haven't shot anything close to Paintball. Can you name another sport where 20,000 balls are easily carried onto the field? Or one where the balls are shot at 300fps? (Apparently faster than the average NASCAR speeds.)

So, if you have a better method for catching great shots of a live game a paintball, I would love to hear them. But currently I get a player who I expect is about to do something interesting (or have something interesting about to happen to) into frame, and just keep shooting. Sure, the chances are good that I'll get 10-20 photos that are nearly identical, and any one is likely a 'decent' photo.

The good shots are the drives, and breaks (as in the moment a player begins to sprint from a bunker). And you don't exactly get a whole lot of warning when a good player is going to do any of these.

The great shots are the snaps (when the player pulls out from the bunker for a split second and fires. You want that 300fps ball of paint to be no more than a foot or two from the barrel of the marker.). And you get even less warning of these.

But the prize of paintball photography is the paint break. (Bounces can be interesting too, but a good goggle shot is king.) And I don't mean just a shot of paint on some guy's mask after the ball has already broken and the paint settled into place. No, you need to have that shot snapped in that fraction of a second just after the ball makes contact with the hard surface and splits, and that moment when the paint begins to settle and becomes still.

Oh, and don't forget, you have to do this while wearing a paintball mask. Blind photographers tend to do poorly after all.


So, how, oh great and glorious master of photography who can tell me I'm 'doing it wrong' based purely on the number of shots I take during an excessively fast sport (I've seen matches end in less than 20 seconds.), exactly do you plan to have a hope in hell of getting a prize shot if you are taking 4 or less shots a game? I know all the glass in this hobby can get expensive, but just how much do those crystal balls that tell you the exact millisecond to press shutter button cost?